Harbour Jeremy - Go Do Deals: The Entrepreneurs Guide to Buying & Selling Businesses

THE ENTREPRENEURS GUIDE
TO BUYING & SELLING BUSINESSES

JEREMY HARBOUR

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

GO DO DEALS

THE ENTREPRENEURS GUIDE
TO BUYING & SELLING BUSINESSES

2021 JEREMY HARBOUR

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-63195-293-7 paperback

ISBN 978-1-63195-294-4 eBook

ISBN 978-1-63195-292-0 hardcover

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020915459

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Dont blame me. I made it all up. Dont do anything I say, unless its a raging successin which case it was definitely all me.

For Simona, Ariella, and Aiden

Theres that moment where something big is agreed, and your future shifts as a result. Most people will only ever do just a few life-changing dealsentering their marriage, starting a business, and buying a home being among the bigger ones.

A small number of people do a lot of deals. They buy and sell many properties, start several businesses, acquire their competitors, find investors to back their ideas, secure the rights to intellectual property, get publishing contracts to write a book, or any number of life-changing deals that are there to be done.

Most people have not recognized that living a big, exciting life is linked to the ability to do deals.

Without this realization, they arent even looking for life-changing deals, and, subsequently, they walk past ten of them a month.

In many ways, this was me before I met Jeremy Harbour. I had started and grown a successful business, but I was focused only on one type of deal-making sales. As a small business owner, my mind was focused on the day-to-day operations of my business, and, naturally, a big part of that was finding customers. I had trained my mind to always be on the lookout for potential clients, and I didnt see much else.

When I started spending time with Jeremy, things changed. He radically challenged my thinking about business and life. He seemed to be playing by a different set of rules, and his rules were producing remarkable results.

I met Jeremy at an entrepreneurs networking event and discovered that he had thirteen businesses but didnt run any of them day-today. He employed people he had never met; he made money from products that he had never personally sold. Whats more, he hadnt started any of these businesses; he had bought themhed done deals to acquire them.

Over the years, I witnessed Jeremy buying and selling businesses very quickly and often with very little of his own money in the deal. He bought a variety of businessesa gym, a technology provider, a fashion retailer, a training company, a commercial kitchen cleaning business, an air-conditioning repair companyand every time we talked, he had another deal on the go.

He then sold these businesses for vast gains. Often, he would structure a deal that would see him earning money from a deal for the following three to five years.

What impressed me most was that, when I met people Jeremy was doing deals with, they all spoke highly of him. He created win-win deals, expanding the horizons for all parties involved. To this day, Ive not met a person who wouldnt do more deals with Jeremy.

When the global financial crisis threatened to melt down economies around the world, most people were scared and gloomy. I was shocked to see how excited Jeremy was at the prospect of so many deals that were now available to be done. He snapped up dozens of deals during that time and made extraordinary sums of money along the way.

Fortunately, I started to catch on to this new approach. Jeremys words echoed in my mind: If you do more deals, youll live a bigger, better life.

I went out and did several deals that changed things for me, too. I raised investment to grow my business, I did four acquisitions, and took a stake in half a dozen companies. I exited a deal and bought out a business partner. Jeremy was right; doing deals changed things rapidly.

While I was getting better at doing small business deals, Jeremy shifted his focus onto bigger deals. He began looking into the world of private equity and public markets. He researched intensely for over a year before creating a deal structure now known as an Agglomeration. This deal structure saw him launch a collaborative IPO on the Nasdaq, where over twenty businesses went from being private companies to publicly-traded stock.

Doing big deals has led to a big life for Jeremy. His typical year consists of travelling to his houses around the world, spending time on his luxury boats (two of them), and going on dream holidays every few months. Not bad for a guy who dropped out of high school and started his career trading trinkets at weekend market stalls.

The book you have in your hands is a generous gift. It covers key ideas and core principles Jeremy has deployed to build up his empire. For the cost of a pub meal, youll start to see how you could buy the pub with little or none of your own money.

After reading this book, youll look at the world differently and recognize how many hundreds of potential deals youve already walked right past without knowing it. If ever theres another financial crisis or recession, youll probably get excited rather than scared at the prospect of so many opportunities to do deals.

Youll also see many of your business role models differently. Youll recognize that Richard Branson has been doing deals a lot more than businesses. Youll see that the meteoric rise of Google is just as much a story of acquisitions and deal flow as it is a story of technology and innovation. Youll look at Bill Gates differently: he built Microsoft on a series of big deals. Even creatives like JK Rowling or Oprah have made their fortunes through deals.

The ideas in this book will challenge your thinking, give you new strategies, and change the way you do business. Hopefully, as a result of this book, you will go and do deals that completely change your life for the better.

Daniel Priestley
Entrepreneur and Best-Selling Author

I have always been business-sector agnostic, and so my first deals were in a wide range of industries including telecom, IT, a health club and spa, and a music school. After I had done a dozen or so of my own deals, I started to get a bit of a reputation for doing deals without using any of my own money or borrowing from banks.

I had people chasing me to work for them in some capacity, either as a non-executive director or on some sort of consultancy basis, to help them acquire companies for no money down. I just couldnt think of any good reason why on earth I would want to do that. When I find a company that I can buy for $1, I just buy it. Why would I want a salary to do that for someone else?

Then one day, I bought a business seminar company. It made me think that perhaps an educational program could be a way to work with these aspiring dealmakers to give them the tools and tactics needed to acquire companies themselves. This would create potential future partners who understood my methodology, and they would have no qualms about making deals on their own because they would have paid for the information.