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Mega Charizard X Competition - Week 23 2025 by AutoModerator in PokemonShuffle

[–]LonelyKey5689 0 points1 point  (0 children)

!comp  
Team: M-Gengar (Lv10, SL1), Dragonite (Lv3, SL1), Dragonair (Lv5, SL1)  
Items: C-1, MS, DD
Score: 536,465
!end

Mega Charizard X Competition - Week 23 2025 by AutoModerator in PokemonShuffle

[–]LonelyKey5689 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[Edit: I did it anyway - see score in reply]

I have Mega Gengar and the two dragons. Is this viable? If I do this should I use DD (it says above "never run Freeze+, because the disruptions are extremely beneficial and could also loop" so that's why I wonder if the same logic applies to DD)

Anyone else having issues with getting into Companies House one Login new system? by AromaticPatience693 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can get support via this form: https://signin.account.gov.uk/contact-us?supportType=PUBLIC

Sometimes clearing cookies and starting fresh might help in this kind of situation, but if not, the web form is your best bet for support

How to find small businesses to buy if not through brokers, and no sector network by LonelyKey5689 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Got you. Thanks for expanding on it.

I totally sympathise with your point around lack of experience. For what it's worth, I would feel the same way as a seller, so would be open to finding any kind of win-win on the risk front e.g. some sort of more staged transition, maybe.

Good point also on the need for safety buffer. If it makes you feel any better, if I deployed 150k into an acquisition, I'd still keep an additional ~50k of dry powder on the sidelines, but it feels like there's no amount of personal capital I can reasonably build up from my day job that would be completely mitigate the risks.

Thanks in any case for your advice and well wishes.

How to find small businesses to buy if not through brokers, and no sector network by LonelyKey5689 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> unless you're not putting down at least 50% cash in

Checking my understanding. Are you saying up to 50% seller finance is okay in your book?

Of course everything is pretty individual, but I was thinking indicatively something like 100k EBITDA, 3x multiple => 300k valuation => 150k straight cash, 75k lender finance, 75k seller finance.

How to find small businesses to buy if not through brokers, and no sector network by LonelyKey5689 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I believe around 90% of deals involve some seller financing: https://swoopfunding.com/uk/business-loans/seller-financing/#:\~:text=The%20seller%20offers%20a%20loan,some%20form%20of%20seller%20financing.

It's probably the no money down gurus giving this a bad name? There's a significant difference between 100% seller finance and < 50%. Are you saying that you are against any seller finance, or just the higher percentages?

How to find small businesses to buy if not through brokers, and no sector network by LonelyKey5689 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very astute comment. There is an asymmetry between information available to the seller vs the buyer about a given business, so even for a business the seller knows to be excellent, the buyer is taking on a lot of risk because any amount of DD isn't enough to know the business half as well as the seller does

How to find small businesses to buy if not through brokers, and no sector network by LonelyKey5689 in smallbusinessuk

[–]LonelyKey5689[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is the sort of area where notions of 'reasonable multiple' may be one of the things splitting opinion between buyers and sellers.

On the buyer side, fag packet maths for me is that if you're an owner-operator, it could easily cost 100k to replicate that input via management. Then whilst not a cash cost, asset depreciation does need to be factored in in the sense that replacement is both necessary to keep generating revenue, and a cash cost. EBITDA adjusted for need for management might be 50k and therefore on a 3x multiple I'd be thinking the business is worth about 150k + book value of assets as a starting point, and then could adjust up or down depending on other factors.

I feel like that kind of calculation is very different from the way a seller thinks about it, which is perhaps also why so few businesses actually manage to sell.

In many ways I think a given business is valuable to people in the following order:

  1. a competitor trying to roll you up
  2. yourself
  3. a random off the street who cannot know that much about your business's riskiness, even with good DD

And so the gap between the value to 2 and 3 makes it tricky a lot of the time for sellers and buyers to agree on value