🆕 Pontoon Rental Company in Austin Texas! 🚤

Welcome Back to The Corporate Pivot!

If you’re stuck wondering whether today’s free bagels are worth getting out of bed for, The Corporate Pivot has a better offer. We’re here to show you how buying a small business can get you more than a carb-fueled Monday—like freedom, control, and a chance to build something that’s actually yours.

Confusing Corporate Saying of the Day:

“That’s above my pay grade”

Professional Translation: Something that is outside the scope of your responsibility.

Corporate Pivot Translation: Can I do it? Yeah probably. Am I going to? NO CHANCE

Here’s what we have for you today:

Sam’s Perspective (1st Time Buyer)

🆕 Status Update: Getting closer to my first purchase, and I’ll be honest—it’s confusing, especially when it’s your first time. Luckily, I have people like Tyler to bounce ideas off of, and having someone who's been through this process is incredibly valuable. You can read and learn all you want on your own, but there’s no substitute for real-world experience from someone who's done it.

One thing that stands out, especially for those of you in my shoes, is figuring out how to balance a 9-5 job with the business acquisition process. First off, you’ve got to stay disciplined and stick with the plan. Here at The Corporate Pivot, we’re working on tools to speed up that process—tools that are actually tested and useful in the real world.

The next challenge? Balancing running a business while still working your 9-5. That’s why it’s critical to buy a business where the owner wants to stay on for a while, has someone ready to step up, or where you can find a good hire to handle the day-to-day. This is a must for your first acquisition. Until that business can replace your full-time income, you won’t have time to do anything other than high-level business processes and paperwork.

I’m gathering feedback from other Pivoters who’ve found ways to balance it all, and I’ll be sharing what I learn soon. Stay tuned!

💪 Challenge of the week: Tomorrow is the day to talk with the owner of the tree business. Stay tuned for an update on Thursdays edition!

📚 Cool Business of the Week: Used Car Meetup

You might be thinking that I lost my mind on this one, but it’s actually a cool idea. So I discovered a company that rents out their local universities parking lot and finds people that are trying to sell their used cars. They can find those people through facebook marketplace or local listings in their area. They charge those people $150 to get a spot for the weekend and then they host a used car show for buyers to come in and take a look at some off market vehicles that are for sale. They are simply pairing the buyers with the sellers and making money on both sides. The treat it like an event and have people come in with food trucks and charge admission. Really the idea is a little crazy to me, since everything is digital these days. But if you think about it, Facebook marketplace is the absolute worst to try and buy/sell something. You get a ton of messages that usually never pan out and it always ends up with the person coming to look at it to see if they like it. Well, problem solved with these Einsteins of the used car market. This idea is insanely simple, but pretty cool that somebody figured out how to get demand for this business.

Tyler’s Perspective (Multiple Businesses Owned)

🚨 Tip of the Week: This week I started working on building out our proforma p&l (which means I essentially rebuilt the P&L provided and adjusted the assumptions from an investors point of view). For this deal, Sam and I would likely be minority investors, which obviously adds risk (for the lack of decision making authority). In creating the proforma P&L I think it is important to run a sensitivity analysis on your assumptions (which should be conservative to begin with). If your investment will perform well even at 70% (or whatever number you are comfortable with) of your projections, then this should give you added confidence going into the deal. We are getting close to a proposal, and will keep you posted. 

💰 Deals < $500k

Business Name: Pontoon Rental Company
Revenue: $227,417
Asking Price: $269,000
Profit: $112,786 (Profit Multiple = 2.38x)
Location: Austin, Texas
Established: 2020

✅ Pros:

• Established customer base: Strong reputation with over 400 Google reviews and numerous repeat customers.

• Low overhead: Operates primarily on weekends, reducing operational costs.

⚠️ Cons:

• Seasonal operation: Only open 8 months out of the year, limiting potential year-round revenue.

📈 Growth Opportunities:

• Expand the fleet: Adding more pontoons could increase the number of charters available.

• Leverage social media: Building an online presence could attract more customers and enhance brand visibility.

💰💰 Deals $500k - $2m

Business Name: Pet Boarding & Grooming Business
Revenue: $500,000
Asking Price: $659,900
Profit: $200,000 (Profit Multiple = 3.30x)
Location: Owensboro, Kentucky
Established: 2009

✅ Pros:

• Diversified services: Offers grooming, boarding, and retail, providing multiple revenue streams.

• Established staff: Trained groomers and kennel workers who will remain post-sale.

⚠️ Cons:

• Limited growth without expansion: Additional acreage and facilities are underutilized.

📈 Growth Opportunities:

• Doggy daycare: Utilize unused land to offer doggy daycare services, attracting a wider customer base.

• Private rental: Rent out space for individuals who want private playtime with their pets.

💰💰💰Deals $2m-$10m

Business Name: Accounting Firm with Remote Staff
Revenue: $1,109,750
Asking Price: $2,000,000
Profit: $693,141 (Profit Multiple = 2.89x)
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Established: Not specified

✅ Pros:

• High profit margin: Achieves a 60% seller's discretionary earnings, ensuring strong cash flow.

• Remote staffing model: Allows flexibility for staffing and expansion beyond local talent.

⚠️ Cons:

• Leased space: The business operates in a leased building, creating potential future relocation challenges.

📈 Growth Opportunities:

• Increase marketing: Expand client base through more aggressive digital marketing campaigns.

• Offer new services: Introduce advisory or consulting services to complement existing accounting functions.

The Lean Startup: Ch. 6 Part 3

Today we will be discussing Aardvark, the first steps to AI, and the role of quality and design in your MVP. Now you may ask what does this beautiful animal have to do with artificial intelligence??

Well outside of being super cute it's not the animal we are talking about. We are talking about the search engine that helped provide answers to subjective questions. It's easier for Google to answer “What’s the tallest building in New York?”  than “What are the best places to eat near my house?”. Why? Because, that's a subjective question. There is no “right” answer, it's easier for a human to answer than a search engine. Max Ventilla & Damon Horowitz, founders of Aardvark, created a product that would be able to answer these subjective questions easier. 

Aardvark’s founders started with six months of testing, trying to figure out what to build. They built a series of functioning products, each designed to test a way of solving this problem for customers. Each product was offered to beta testers, whose behavior was used to validate or refute each hypothesis. Below are examples from their ideation period.

1. Rekkit. A service to collect your ratings from across the web and give better recommendations to you.

2. Ninjapa. A way that you could open accounts in various applications through a single website and manage your data across multiple sites.

3. The Webb. A central number that you could call and talk to a person who could do anything for you that you could do online. 

4. Web Macros. A way to record sequences of steps on websites so that you could repeat common actions, even across sites, and share “recipes” for how you accomplished online tasks.

5. Internet Button Company. A way to package steps taken on a website and smart form-fill functionality. People could encode buttons and share buttons a la social bookmarking

Read more at corppivot.com!

Hope you enjoy this week's insights and happy deal hunting! Remember, if you find these updates helpful, share this newsletter with a friend!

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