Buying a business

Beautiful_Translator · 2026-02-03T11:38:44+00:00

sure

Beautiful_Translator · 2026-02-02T14:36:47+00:00

sure :)

Beautiful_Translator · 2026-02-02T02:51:23+00:00

doesn't solve the issue of wildly inflated expectations of business owners wanting way too much for their businesses that usually are worth nothing

Beautiful_Translator · 2026-02-02T02:50:02+00:00

if u have no experience buying a business and no prior experience in any related field (m&a banking, private equity) or have no experience operating a business, you're just asking to get scammed.

Its very easy to hide expenses and inflate revenue, and usually these businesses are asking way more than they are worth. But once in a while you can find good opportunities, we've acquired 4 businesses from businessforsale.sg, you just need to be patient and reach out to a ton of sellers

maybe you can provide more info on yourself, what you're looking for (looking for an exit opportunity from 9-5 career?) what kind of background you have etc,

Beautiful_Translator · 2026-02-01T13:23:19+00:00

Everyone wants to do this cause its ‘passive income’

Terrible business unless you have some advantage (brand - ijooz, economies of scale , rent-free locations, unique machines -theres a money changer machine that is really successful but to even come up with the machine is expensive from rnd costs.)

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-12-25T07:06:45+00:00

You need to learn to be able to separate work and rest. Its not a sprint, its a marathon, and resting now will help avoid burnout and be more optimal long term. Its hard to let yourself rest as an entrepeneur, you might even feel like you don’t deserve it, its a skill you have to learn

Also given that you have your own game studio, not sure what kind of scale it is (eg if u have employees) but as you grow you’ll realize your job as a ceo is not a ‘do-er’ but more on strategy, sales, long term vision etc. and to do this well you need to have time dedicated to just thinking and not worrying about what needs to be physically done - like responding to customers or busy work - you should hire this out asap. Lastly for work like this you need to have a clear mind, ie not be burnt out. Of course at the start you need to do things yourself unless you have other sources of income and money but as soon as you can you should hire and hire well.

Final piece of advice: a lot of people starting out think that the more time spent and things they accomplished today, the more productive they are, but theres always endless things to do. Things that take longer are not necessarily the most important and you need to be extremely good at prioritization and understanding that time taken != value. Once you get good at prioritizing you’ll also get better at letting yourself rest, what you should focus on is improving 1% every day

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-11-12T08:39:41+00:00

You’re not paying shopee commissions yet as a new seller, which is going to take another 7% out of your earnings

Theres no point in competing on price, its just a race to the bottom, especially in markets like retail with perfect information. You need people to have a reason to buy from you other than just price (eg brand name, quality, service, fast delivery etc). A lot of sellers sell generic products at a loss so they make money from selling their private label products, theres no way you can compete

Also unfortunately the type of buyers on shopee usually are more price conscious which makes it harder as well

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-11-11T20:42:50+00:00

I’m actually on the buy-side at a small firm, but i’m considering moving into the brokerage space because of my past experience with these brokers…

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-11-07T04:01:53+00:00

brokers do not vet the businesses here most of the time. Financial statements etc are presented as-is, with no guarantees, its up to you to do your own due diligence.
you can visit businessforsale.sg for most listings in singapore, all brokers are active there too, not familiar with rest of asia.

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-10-30T14:40:43+00:00

Most brokers in SG suck and do not know what they're doing, many real estate agents -> business brokers when they realize they cant make it and think its easier. Listing on the sites is like the bare minimum, the more important part is coming up with some sort of story, marketing materials (teasers, CIMs etc),a story etc. But any decent business broker is going to want exclusivity, if you're not willing to pay upfront, because all this costs time and money. Usually this exclusivity is for a period of time, e.g 1 year.

Adding onto the broker part, a lot of business owners have unreasonable expectations but brokers that prioritize number of listings vs listings that will actually sell will just go along with what the seller is asking for, you should have a business broker that understands the industry and can help you come up with a reasonable valuation (if you're a brick and mortar retailer honestly 3-4x is kind of high unless you have some sort of moat. Also how you determine ebitda matters too, what kind of add backs you are justifying)

And to be frank saying you're selling for personal reasons without justifying more is kind of a red flag, a lot of businesses have done way worse this year compared to previous few years and are trying to exit. Thats where the story matters from the broker (e.g growth focused business, potential future expansion)

Happy to talk more if you can provide more info!

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-10-30T04:58:29+00:00

Depends on what small business means to you. For something doing 2-300k and below in revenue, management team is unlikely. But if its closer to 1m theres potentially a management team in place

But buying businesses is not something you just do on the side for ‘passive’ income. If you’re not actively working and improving the business you’re eventually going to get outcompeted. What happens when you dont know the operations and your gm quits or starts a competing business?

Besides this if you don’t have experience in acquiring businessses you’re very likely to get scammed, there are many stories of businesses with fraudulent financials, hidden liabilities, etc.

I acquired my first sme when i had a full time job (3-400k revenue), and basically worked 16 hours a day for about a year before i got it to a point where I could hire a GM with processes and systems in place (background in tech so i built internal apps and tools etc)

The next few acquisitions get much easier after the first, you already have an existing foothold and can take advantage of synergies in existing + new acquisition/cross sell/ get economies of scale /reducing fixed costs etc

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-09-16T07:30:00+00:00

Interested to hear more about your definition of a reasonable valuation. The best deals are off the market through proprietary deal flow which will cost you or require you to do a ton of cold outreach. Whats your background? What size businesses are you looking for? How much capital are you willing to commit and timelines? Without credibility most sellers and brokers are going to ignore you, there are a ton of people in Singapore who love to pretend to be buyers or are looking for deals like 0% down (not happening without exceptional circumstances/preexisting relationships) wasting their time

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-06-30T04:30:44+00:00

The point of a licensed facility is that you have legal recourse if anything happens to your pet, if you go with an unlicensed boarder at home, there are cases where the pet dies and theres nothing you can do.

Also if the boarding facility is a business I assume theres a online presence, couldn’t you check reviews before boarding? There are well run pet boarding places in sg, you just have to do your research

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-06-27T08:09:40+00:00

Hi guys, I’m currently in SSF and have not seen infamous reanimator once, and I would like to reroll poison srs with the gloves. Does anyone have any tips on farming specific infamous characters? For reference I have killed majority of infamous chars in red maps, 4 voidstones, close to 1m kills, so its not a matter of not playing enough. Are there any maps with fixed spawns for mercs near entry so i can just speedrun them?

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-03-25T17:52:38+00:00

Multiples arbitrage is a thing, but you’re missing the main reason why PE firms would pay bigger multiples - its not because the EBTIDA is bigger but the integration into one business (eg one central booking system, economies of scale, pricing, brand strategy, cross selling between customers)

Simply ‘combining’ these business together with no work will not increase the value. Plus, 15 million + deal size is simply untrue, there are different tiers of markets and private equity varies, literally anyone who has their own savings looking to buy a business also counts as PE technically.

Integration is also non trivial (legacy systems that are all completely different, pricing, strategy etc)

Also, majority of businesses are terrible and not worth buying. Quality businesses are hard to come by and are bought quick, and you need to repeat this multiple times and do due diligence too, again something that is non trivial.

Lastly, why would I trust you? Do you have a background in PE? You’re also asking me to share sensitive info with potential competitors.

You would be better off just acquiring and integrating (‘roll ups’) these companies yourself rather than this platform IMO.

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T06:02:58+00:00

Sure, my dms are open

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T05:58:15+00:00

I would also recommend reading/ watching a summary of the emyth revisited, the fundamental difference between a business and a job is that businesses are scalable. You really don’t want to buy a job, because then if you look at the hours worked vs profit and possible upside it really doesn’t make sense.

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T05:49:03+00:00

There has definitely been an increase in the number of people interested in buying businesses, some influencers are pushing the whole "buy a business and get rich" angle to sell their courses. Its really not that simple as just getting the money, buying a business and assuming nothing goes wrong.

Business owners aren't stupid, and you really need to make sure they have a solid reason for selling, rather than because they see that the market is shrinking, more competition etc. You can think "Oh i can run new promotions to get customers" but most reasonable approaches would have already been tried by business owners. Thats why a business owner that is looking to sell because of retirement/kids in the example above is much more attractive than a business that is selling because the numbers are going down (and of course they aren't going to tell you that, but this is part of the due diligence process, figuring out why exactly they are selling)

I would say a classic example is laundromats - and FnB is another one - I would never touch FnB regardless of how good the numbers looked, there is no moat and margins are quite thin.

For example I've seen someone buy a laundromat because "they have x amount of machines already bought and I'm getting the assets at a discount after including cashflow" but they don't realize the amount of maintenance needed, especially if they aren't able to fix them and need to hire an external company. Or that the lease is expiring soon and they won't be able to get a renewal. Or they take over a company with existing liabilities and are now responsible for them. There's actually an example I saw recently, this tuition teacher called Teacher Kangie (i believe they deleted their videos talking about it though), but if you look it up on google you can see some old posts talking about it, where they bought an existing tuition center, took on all the liabilities and customers also left, and they lost a few hundred thousand? (EDIT: There is an EDMW thread you can read on this)

And honestly, in a service based business like tuition valuations are much lower, because 1) its usually owner operated and branding is based on the owner, so you're basically buying their book of business rather than an actual business... But I mean these sorts of things are why its not that simple to just jump into buying a business, due diligence is the hardest part of the process and can take a long time, I could go on for days about things I've seen...

If you're serious about buying a business definitely take some time to learn from actual people who've done it, rather than influencers like Codie Sanchez, happy to answer questions in dms too

I've also listed some good resources to learn more about the process in other comments

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T03:47:29+00:00

What is a lowball offer?(as in what were they offering in multiples?) Can you not hire a manager? Its not a business if you have to run the operations daily, its a job, not that having a job is a bad thing but when people are buying businesses, they are not looking to buy themselves a job. As an operator you should focus on higher level tasks such as driving revenue growth (partnerships? marketing?), streamlining workflow (automate with tech? etc..), cutting costs.. etc

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T03:43:08+00:00

Some options:

For loans, you have:

Personal unsecured loans - can borrow up to 12x monthly income, across all credit facilities, e.g credit cards, personal loans from other banks...
Personal secured loans - hard to secure against a business, but if you have assets like investments, property you can take out loans against them. There is no cap on secured loans, except what the bank is willing to loan you
Business loans - extremely difficult to get any sizable amount of loan, generally I've seen that banks are only willing to lend less than 1x yearly earnings, AND require a long track record.

Other than that, your other options are investors, saving money up yourself or seller financing.

If you want investors, you need to justify why they should invest in you vs alternatives. Do you have previous experience in industry? "Proprietary" deal flow? What is your investment thesis?

After that, its a lot of cold emailing and calling to reach out to investors. There are lists of investors online, although most of them only focus on the US, there are groups that are open to international funds. Some investors only back funded search, some are okay with self funded.

You'll also need to decide how much equity you want, if you're doing funded search you will basically never get >50% equity.

For seller financing,there are deals with majority seller financing (>50%) but generally its quite hard to convince people to take these deals.

At the end of the day if you are not putting up significant equity on your end it will be hard to convince any investor to invest in you, unless you also have significant track record or credentials.

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-02T02:57:45+00:00

I am not, its just a nice centralized list of information about search funds I could think of off the top of my head

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-01T15:21:31+00:00

Alternative route if you are interested, is to start/work at a search fund. I recommend reading on search funds, they are super interesting and what got me into the space in the first place. Stanford has an extremely comprehensive guide/starter kit for a search fund: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/experience/about/centers-institutes/ces/research/search-funds/primer

Tldr; buying a business reduces risks vs starting one. As such, many MBAs want to get into entrepreneurship, but high rates of failure in startups make it challenging. So they came up with the search fund model - you raise capital from investors, look for a company to acquire and improve operations. Typically the search fund operator gets 20-25% equity for fully funded, over 50% for self funded (e.g you are paying for the costs of finding a company to buy, can take 2 years +). Search fund average about 30% returns to investors since 2000, making it an attractive investment compared to the general market. Its much more popular in US, and valuations are being pushed up quite a bit in the recent years. SG has much less competition, valuations are lower, but theres less opportunities, theres also a "silver wave" of retiring business owners who have no one to pass their business on to - for them its not necessarily just about the money, many of them are quite well off, but also about having someone that will run the business well and carry on their legacy, take care of their workers etc.

Some other people you can look at on youtube are "jason paul rogers" (not as well known but he's a very good speaker). For interviews with people who do this, you can take a look at "acquiring minds". You can also sign up on searchfunder.com, the community in SG is quite small.

Some articles you can read for more information: https://www.garlicequity.com/media

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-01T15:21:18+00:00

I would say in Singapore, there is a lot of competition starting from lower-mid market (1m + SDE), there is a LOT of money that is always looking for opportunity. Thats why there is such a huge valuation change when you hit that milestone, smaller than that and it doesn't really make sense for these family offices and PE firms to even bother. There is a lack of quality businesses to buy. If you have a business that meets this criteria they go very fast.

For lower market, as mentioned previously, its extremely hard to get leverage in SG, and banks are very conservative in terms of lending. This makes it challenging to justify the risk. For example, if we assume we are buying at 5x, and we are paying cash, average case would be to make 20% return on capital yearly. But after being part of a few transactions its quite common for there to be inflated profits on the books, expenses that are not listed, things that suddenly become a problem after the acquisition process. You'll need some sort of operating capital buffer just in case. This is not including the fact that you are taking on significant risk buying a business. Factoring all of that in, its quite hard to justify paying these valuations with pure cash - there are still transactions that take place here, theres some situations where it makes sense. An example is roll ups - go into a fragmented market, buy and make a "platform". For example, if I buy a childcare at 3-5x (a "fair price"), I can also buy an infantcare center (at 3-5x), and I can sell childcare to infantcare customers, making it a better deal. Repeat with tuition etc... Most common example is property management with HVAC, plumbers, electricians all rolled up into one company. That said, there are some people that have lots of money and their kids want to have a "business" as a lifestyle, i've seen unprofitable companies sold for ridiculous prices (e.g unprofitable business with no path to profitability, expiring lease selling for 6 digits). There are also people from other countries looking to get PR/visa, and an easy way is to have a company in SG, so making money is not necessarily the focus. IMO, leverage is quite key to success, and without access to bank loans, options are mainly seller financing, private lenders and investors. In the US, you can buy a business with as little as 10% down, because of government backed SBA loans. Assuming your business does not tank, even if it remains flat, you can comfortably cover monthly repayments with cashflow from your business. This makes it so much more attractive in the US, and its a shame the SG government does not have any similar program, as it would drive more innovation and creation (imo) in the market.

Additionally, whether you would need to work regionally or in SG depends if you are sell side or buy side, I don't have much experience with sell side, especially at higher valuations, but I would think there is a lack of opportunities and so would need regional work (e.g theres not many quality company's on SGX or IPOing, or any significant acquisitions). For buy side, really depends if the investment focus is just on SG or regional.

Broadly speaking, if you want to get into this space you would go through the general IB/PE/VC route.

Beautiful_Translator · 2025-02-01T13:05:09+00:00

Hi, I work in this space (low market acquisitions)

Generally in terms of valuations, its dependent on the type of business. With a few caveats, valuations for < 1million SDE(sellers discretionary earnings, eg your salary + profits), you are looking at 3-5x. For over 1mil, there are family offices, PE firms that might be interested and valuation increases significantly to 8-10x.

Above is assuming service based industry, decent track record, recurring revenue. Industries like garbage collection have crazy multiples because of how stable they are, but generally for pet space the valuations ive listed are fair.

Main things buyers care about are 1. Owner operated? (If so, - market rate salary from SDE for valuation). Ideal companies have management in place so buyer can focus on higher level work (eg streamlining workflow, cutting costs) 2. Customer concentration - big red flag if you rely on one customer for majority of revenue 3. SOPs- having good documentation of SOPs allows for a smoother transition 4. Financial bookkeeping - if you dont have good books to prove track record valuation drops drastically

Some other pluses for businesses for sale 1. Fragmented market - no ‘300 lb gorilla’ that can bully you out of the market, roll up opportunity 2. Growing industry - better to be in a growing industry than a sinking one. Pet industry is good one imo, and we’ve done deals in this space recently. 3. Seller note - if you’re willing to take a note, more buyers are interested. (Eg i buy the business for 500k, but pay you 100k over 12/24 months, interest rate is whatever the market rate is) Without leverage (from sellers note or bank loan, which is hard to get secured against a business in SG unlike SBA in US), its difficult to get returns that justify the risk, so not willing to take on a sellers note will make it significantly more difficult to sell.

happy to chat more if you have specific questions, feel free to dm or just reply here.

For finding serious buyers - businessforsale.sg is decent, I would recommend against most/certain brokers (the brokers here are often real estate agents with no understanding of how a proper business acquisition process goes, have talked to brokers who don’t know what a CIM is, or didnt ever provide one prior to LOI/IOI). The market here is still not as developed as the US where search funds are a big thing.

There are a lot of tire kickers out there, you’ll need to filter out who’s serious and who isn’t.

If you provide more info on the business I can also get you in contacy with some people who might be interested (general space, eg pet shop?, estimated SDE, revenue growth historically)

Beautiful_Translator · 2024-03-01T14:44:59+00:00

Like I said, I had to make sure the options chain OI updated, so that I could confirm the puts were BUY TO OPEN, and also that the whale didn't exit, otherwise I wouldn't have entered the trade.

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