Domain Magnate dives into the world of podcasting. For our pilot episode, our CEO and Founder, Michael Bereslavsky and our Deal Manager, Colton Moffitt gives you an overview about our company, Domain Magnate. In this 11-minute episode, we dig down into more details about our own approach, processes, and a few things we have learned from over a decade of experience buying, optimizing, and selling online businesses.
We also provided some practical insights and tidbits on how we are able to sell profitable online businesses done within days! Lastly, Michael discussed what you can expect from us in the next episodes!
Skip to the good parts:
00:20 – 00:45 Know more about Michael Bereslavsky and Colton Moffitt
00:45 – 02:25 Know more about Domain Magnate, our funds, and services
02:50 – 04:53 Our very own process that lead to 300+ successful transactions
04:53 – 05:23 Overview of our portfolio
05:23 – 07:11 What makes our process different and effective? How do you pick your focus?
09:03 – 09:50 What to expect in the next episodes?
Show Transcript:
Michael Bereslavsky 0:14 Hello, podcast listeners! Welcome to The Domain Magnate Podcast! I’m Michael Bereslavsky, the founder and CEO of Domain Magnate. I’ve been involved in buying, managing, and growing online businesses for the past 15 years.
Colton Moffitt 0:33 And I’m Colton Moffitt, Deal Manager for Domain Magnate. Over the past few years, I’ve managed over successful transactions assisting with a variety of aspects from the deal flow and due diligence, negotiation, and closing.
Michael Bereslavsky 0:48 So at Domain Magnate, we buy established online businesses, we currently mostly focus on organic traffic, content websites, and SaaS businesses.
And we also recently started our first fund, we have several of our investors and we are planning to launch more funds and we also have a few different services for buyers.
Colton Moffitt 1:15 Yeah. So the things that we do for buyer from the due diligence side all the way, actually just finding the deals to begin with. Depends on what you need, but we do concierge buying to help you determine what your criteria will be or if you already have that in mind.
And we’ll go out and find those deals and complete the due diligence. And we actually also offer a service to manage those sites. We purchase them. You don’t have to worry about managing, and we have that as well.
Michael Bereslavsky 1:46 And we have done hundreds of deals in the last decade and a half, and our focus is quite different from most other buyers because most buyers tend to look at managing as the area where they bring most of the profits, most of the benefit. Well, we generally focus more on the deal flow to manage our own deal flow if you buy only directly and privately and the focus on finding the very best deals that we can for ourselves, for our funds and for our clients as well.
Colton Moffitt 2:26 Yeah, that’s something that I’ve really enjoyed about working here with Domain Magnate is that we actually really emphasize relationships. So you have referrals that happen quite often and repeat business. So with such a small industry that is growing rapidly, it’s so important tofocus on that. So when we do outreach, and we do source new relationships for deals, you know we keep that very targeted and personal with the focus on quality. And then when we begin to work with a seller, we’ll go from, you know, getting that initial information to verifying it, completing that quickly and in a way that’s smooth for them and easy relative to what they might have to do to go list somewhere. However, we’re also very thorough and so have we emphasize keeping things simple for them but also safe for our investors or our buyer clients.
Michael Bereslavsky 3:17 We also have our own approach to due diligence. So the way we try to look at every deal is a little bit different from how people are used to looking at it. And if you divide every deal into three different categories, they separately look at the numbers and then we tried to assess the risks and assign them into different categories and we look at the opportunities for improvement of each business and then give you the results of our research. And that’s how you could find a good deal, the one based on all these three criteria. Many buyers tend to make the mistake of most in focusing either on the numbers or the opportunities or the risk but not taking the full picture in the account before making the decision.
Colton Moffitt 4:15 Yeah, that’s been quite interesting as we began to work together, learning about how you conduct due diligence versus say, some of the brokers I’ve worked with are sellers and buyers on Flippa. And that’s quite a unique perspective because you’ve incorporated the approach that you might get from books, like never split the difference or what you might get from other sorts of books about how to look at a deal, how to look at a negotiation in a way that it still gets everyone with their, what they want, but where we don’t fall into cognitive biases that might make us really just fit the data to whatever we feel we want to get out of it, which is quite dangerous, you know? But it works well. And recently, we were able to acquire a content business in the health niche. And that has an annual net profit of over 150,000 and just the month before that we picked up a SaaS business with 50,000 in annual net profits. So we can move fairly quickly whether we’re doing this for buyers or we’re going out and representing our investors, our own fund. It’s something that we also try to make sure that the sellers enjoy too. And we maintain that relationship because we always want to work with them again in the future.
Michael Bereslavsky 5:26 And our goal at Domain Magnate is trying to make the process much more efficient and much better for both sides. I personally think that the regular process when you go and sung your business with brokers, it’s just way too slow. It would often take you several weeks just to get, uh, to get it listed. That’s a good start. We basically, for process of listing your business for sale and then several more weeks to get things approved and then many months to wait, to see if the buyer comes in, make many calls, and then the closing process might also take many, many weeks. And then you might not even get your money right away because often you would have a name, a longer period of potentially twelve months, sort of a couple of years during which would get most of your money and you tried to make it much faster and much more efficient and you’ve been able to close six figure deals in just a few days or up to a week or too often, especially helping sellers that are looking for a quick deal.
People who just want to move on from their business and go into something new. And most sellers, they don’t really want to learn about selling a business. They just like starting businesses, building businesses. So, we try to generally revolutionize the industry by allowing people that option of quickly selling their business and at the same time, and we are also constantly improving our methods and our ways of doing things and trying to be more efficient and more targeted at how we pick the best deals, which are also based on our current strengths. So we do not do any e-commerce deals right now just because we don’t have as much experience in that. So we are mainly focusing on the content businesses and that’s been working quite well for us in the last years we’ve been able to consistently achieve a return of 100% on the invested capital and now as we are expanding and growing, we are looking forward to incorporate some of those new methods and keep expanding our portfolio.
Colton Moffitt 7:54 Yeah, that’s really impressive and it’s exciting the things that we’re getting into in the next year, two years ahead because of what you mentioned before, providing that option for a seller to quickly move on because a lot of the times they are serial entrepreneurs and they’ve created something of value, but they don’t really want to push it to that next level and we know how to identify that and help them with that process and then find the next person once we’ve kind of gotten it stabilized that they’re going to take it to that next level. And so that’s, those are our buyers often, and we enjoy working with those sellers. And we also give way to sell their business without having to show it to so many people. For instance, when you put it on a marketplace where you go to a broker, there are a lot of people who are looking into it, and if you end up not making a sale, that can be quite rough on you. And alternatively, as a buyer, when you buy something that’s gone through a brokerage or a marketplace process, you might have a lot of competitors who’s everybody else who wanted to buy it then. So it’s tough, and that’s why people tend to prefer private sale, and it’s difficult. But we specialize in mastering that process.
Michael Bereslavsky 9:05 Yeah, and about the podcast, so, over the past few years I’ve been very fortunate to meet some of the most successful online entrepreneurs and business owners and have been able to have some really interesting conversations now. And I was always thinking about how amazing it would be to recur some of those conversations? And that’s the main idea, we are going to be talking about buying and managing online businesses, and we are going to interview some guests that are doing some really interesting things at a good scale in this industry. And we will also discuss our methods, our ways of doing things, and generally our approach to the industry and to buy businesses.
Colton Moffitt 9:54 Yeah, and if you want to hear more about this and follow this progress or if you’re interested in selling a business you might own or participating in the investment or buying one of those that we might have listed of our own, just go to domainmagnate.com. If you do want to sell, it’s domainmagnate.com/sell, and if you would like to consider being an investor with us, it’s domainmagnate.com/investors
Michael Bereslavsky 10:18 Thank you for listening and I’m looking forward to connecting with you in later episodes.
Colton Moffitt : Thank you.
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