In this episode of the Domain Magnate Show, we tune in to meet the team behind Dealflow Brokerage and are also provided with some advice for buyers and sellers and a quick view of the industry.
DEAL FLOW BROKERAGE TEAM:
Michael Bereslavsky
PARTNER | STRATEGY
Michael is an online business entrepreneur and investor. He started building, buying and selling websites as a student and later founded Domain Magnate in 2008 to make a career out of it. The business has since grown and transformed to focus on acquisitions and sales of established websites.
Connect with Michael: Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
Jamie Toyne
FOUNDER | CEO
Jamie is a serial entrepreneur and a former Director at Flippa.com. During the completion of his double-degree in finance and entrepreneurship at RMIT, Jamie consulted large retail brands on their eCommerce strategy. He then shifted his focus toward internet companies where he bought and sold websites and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs do the same.
Connect with Jamie: Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
Colton Moffitt
PARTNER | BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Colton has built his strong reputation on the back of his diligent and enterprising nature. Before founding Allied Strategic Advisors, his main focus was helping web entrepreneurs with due diligence, deal negotiation, and closing.
Connect with Colton: Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
Kevin Fink
SENIOR | M&A ADVISOR
Kevin has a wealth of experience dealing with domains and websites dating back to 2010. Having worked for and consulted some of the world’s largest brokerages and marketplaces he has traversed everything from closing deals to growth marketing.
Connect with Kevin: Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
Nick Brown
SENIOR | M&A ADVISOR
Nick holds two masters degrees, including an MBA, and has accumulated a wealth of experience in mergers and acquisitions. He enjoys distilling complex business concepts into effective sales materials, as well as working closely with his clients to source quality investment opportunities and facilitate fair, equitable deals.
Connect with Nick: Email | Twitter | LinkedIn
SKIP TO THE GOOD PARTS:
- 0:10 – 5:28 Meeting the Domain Magnate team.
- 8:13 – 9:40 Considering Dealflow Brokerage over other M&A Advisors.
- 9:46 – 11.59 Advice from the team for planning your company’s exit plan.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Michael Bereslavsky 0:10 Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Domain Magnate show. And today we have our team from Dealflow Brokerage. And we want to introduce ourselves and tell a bit more about what Dealflow Brokerage is. Dealflow Brokerage is a company that’s been around for more than seven years now, and is an M&A advisor and they specialize in brokering, established online businesses. So today we’d like to tell a little bit more about how this works. And first, we’ll do a quick introduction of our team. So I am a partner on strategy in Dealflow Brokerage, and my job is basically to make sure that companies are developing in the right path, that we are growing, that we are able to provide great services to our clients. And I’ve personally been around the industry for about 15 years now, buying, selling and also brokering some businesses, and I’m happy to to be able to contribute my experiences. Jamie is our CEO. Jamie, tell us a little about yourself.
Jamie Toyne 1:28 Sure. I started about seven years ago. I got a job straight out of business school. I was studying entrepreneurship program there at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and started working at Flippa, brokering some deals, some deals under a brand called Dealflow. And yeah, I just sort of fell in love with I guess the space you know, the way that you know people all over the world are using our stuff with themselves. And so yeah, seven years later here I am.
Michael Bereslavsky 2:11 Thank you, Jamie. And Colton is a partner on business development. Hi, Colton.
Colton Moffitt 2:19 So, thanks for the intro. I actually met Jamie, Nick and Kevin. Some years ago in 2016, I flew down to San Francisco to get to know them at the office, Flippa’s office in San Francisco and joined to be an account manager. And so I learned a lot from these guys when they were the brokers leading Dealflow there in San Francisco. And Kevin at the time was a domain broker. So I went a bit from him as well and got a sense of how the industry works and started to apply that and once I kind of went on my own did a little bit of brokering but I also took an interest in the due diligence side, assisting with buy side deals, so kind of got a full spectrum experience with that and now when it comes to Dealflow brokers in our activity, I mostly focus on working with buyers to help them set their criteria and you know, take a proactive approach to finding those assets on the market. And also, we do a lot of talking to potential partners and that’s what I focus on.
Michael Bereslavsky 3:17 Awesome. And now Nick, our senior broker, Senior Advisor.
Nick Brown 3:24 My name is Nick Brown. I started working for Dealflow when it was still part of Flippa in San Francisco with Jamie, Colton, and Kevin. I joined right after leaving graduated from business school, I got my MBA at University of Florida. And I started as an account manager with really no background in the brokerage or web domain space. So it was a really great learning experience being an account manager and I’ve been here for five years and really became very interested in I really like working with all the clients all around the world, getting to know them businesses and then personally in helping them exit at the price they want.
Michael Bereslavsky 4:04 Thank you, Nick and Kevin our second, another senior M&A adviser.
Kevin Fink 4:13 Thanks, Michael. It seems like I’ve met all of you in my past life in the domain name space. I was director of domains of Flippa from 2014 on. So I met Jamie and Nick and then later Colton, but I think Michael, I think you might have been a customer. I remember correctly. Yeah, worked with fairly closely at times. So it’s interesting that it’s come full circle, but that’s my sort of background, which I’m still loosely involved in. And I’ve been an M&A advisor just shy of two years with Dealflow. The reason I prefer the business side of the sort of exit, if you will, is the seller history and the seller story. There’s so much that goes into building a business or running a business and the exit in particular can be kind of fraught with as a sort of emotional rollercoaster. And we are the stewards of that sort of journey that a seller will embark on. And it’s been really rewarding to be able to help so many people exit, but it’s also really fun to kind of learn more about people’s businesses and what goes on what goes into it, what goes on behind the scenes and trials and tribulations essentially, they’ve overcome.
Michael Bereslavsky 5:28 Yeah, thank you, Kevin. Yeah, absolutely. It’s been interesting because we’ve all been in that same industry for many years now and have interacted with each other for some time even before we’ve joined forces last year. So now that we’ve done a quick introduction, we want to tell you a little bit more about Dealflow Brokerage and also provide some advice for buyers and sellers and a quick view of the industry. So myself personally I’ve been mostly involved on the buying side. And that is, which is where my main expertise are. And having done hundreds of deals, I would say that this is also my favorite part of of the business. I like looking at the deals and negotiating and buying it. And I think that now than and we are recording this in, June, 2020, with this global economy in a bit of a recession, due to the COVID pandemic, and we are seeing that many people are looking to sell their businesses and they are seeing that the industry is changing. So it’s still a bit difficult to predict how it’s going to look in the next few years or decades. But we are definitely seeing some major changes and now more than ever, it’s important to talk with professionals to help you sell your business to help you prepare your business for sale and also advise you on how to find a great deal, how to do due diligence and how to conduct the transaction professionally. So on that, on that note, we want to give you some further advice. Jamie, what would you want to offer as advice?
Jamie Toyne 7:29 Yeah, sure. Um, I mean, all that all the classic stuff really but um, you know, if, obviously, businesses you know, are a lot more sellable and sell for high multiples when they’re, performing well and obviously, in this time of recession, it’s tricky. A lot of businesses aren’t performing at their best. So yeah, you know, transparency is really important and just working with a broker a couple of months out, at least to sort of get everything in the right position for sale is my number one sort of advice.
Michael Bereslavsky 8:13 Sounds good. Thank you. Colton, what would you say about why Dealflow Brokerage is something people should…why we are the brand that people should choose among the other M&A advisors?
Colton Moffitt 8:30 Sure, to follow on with what Jamie said, we really look at the entire spectrum of ownership and one of these assets. So I speak to a lot of kinds of investors, whether it’s individuals, or it’s people who are working with small private equity firms, family offices, and generally speaking, there is a need for, you know, a low risk and a pretty high return. That’s why anybody, I should say, relatively low risk within this space. That’s why anybody gets involved with it. So what we want to do is help people proactively identify with what their ideal acquisition might be, and then provide them the resources and the connections that be necessary to to have a good plan for the six to 12 months after they purchase it to really increase that value, and be more certain of recovering their investment when they work with us. And one of the ways that we do that, and I’m really focused on right now is developing partnerships with top tier service providers within this space. So if you’re watching or listening to this, and you’re thinking, Hey, I might not be ready to buy or sell, but I provide really great marketing services, copywriting services, accounting for people who work remotely, please, by all means, feel free to reach out to me directly, and we have to talk about that too.
Michael Bereslavsky 9:43 Nick.
Nick Brown 9:46 Yeah, I think my biggest piece of advice and I can’t really overstate the importance of exit planning. As Jamie mentioned a little bit earlier, a lot of times we’ll have sellers who have had a lot of success with their business. But maybe it’s on a downward trend. And they come in, they want to sell when the business has had three bad months in a row. So I recommend in really place a high premium on the extra planning. And fortunately, deal flow offers an excellent planning service. Because this will allow you to make sure your financials are in order, you have them separated from your personal accounts. You have the contracts ready to be transferred to a new buyer. It’s really all of the things that go into selling the business and you work with a broker like myself or Kevin, and we can tell you what we think are issues with the business, or what we think is a good selling point about the business and really had this discussion in relationship growing a few months before you’re ready to sell, because I think that would help us and you exit at the price that you want.
Michael Bereslavsky 10:51 Thank you, Nick, Kevin.
Kevin Fink 10:56 Back to this seller story as I was talking about in my intro, I think the most important thing I’ve learned in working with sellers, what I sort of prefer to advise them upfront is that no business runs entirely without a hitch. There’s always going to be something that comes up, some sort of speed bump, if you will. So in the exit process, when we’re getting the listing ready to launch, I try to impart on the seller that just the importance of being transparent and open about anything that might have happened. You know, if it if there’s a downturn in traffic or revenue, for whatever reason, being really upfront about that, the buyer appreciates it, and it’s probably going to come out and due diligence at some point anyway. So it’s really good to sort of spin that story and really turn into a positive as an opportunity for a buyer but also to show how the seller might have handled that incident. Or, you know, any sort of adversity that they experienced them running the business and it creates a good rapport between the buyer and seller as well.
Michael Bereslavsky 12:01 Thank you, Kevin. And thanks, everyone. So there you go. This is our team at Dealflow Brokerage, and you’re welcome to learn more by going to dealflowbrokerage.com. And also, you can get a quick free evaluation through dealflowbrokerage.com/sell. Or if you’re looking to buy a business, go to dealflowbrokerage.com/buy and join our list. And we are happy to quickly advise you on how you should proceed with your sale of purchase, and work with you on your next acquisition or exit. Thank you.
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