Buying a Business: Trust No One.

The problem with business brokers, along with every other person, is that they're looking out for themselves.  They want to sell businesses as fast as possible and for as much money as possible.  That is great if you're a seller.  They are made for you.  They exist to make your pockets bigger - not to mention their own.  But when you are buying, you need to watch them.

Finding companies to buy can be harder than you'd think.  Owners often are hesitant to advertise.  They don't want customers to question the companies stability, they don't want employees to jump ship, they don't want to lose what they've been working years for.  Consequently when you find a company for sale, you most likely are going to find it listed through a business broker. 

The business broker is going to help you, but he is also going to help the seller.  You paying more means the broker makes more, so when you see the information sheet try to get to some sort of valid type of document as fast as possible.  Anyone can write gross and net on a piece of paper and tell you that's what it makes so this is what it costs.  Be weary of that.  Get taxes.  And do your homework.  And get an accountant.  If you evaluate wrong, you'll suffer for a long time. 

Unicorns ARE cool

I think they should modify some stories.  Change them up.  We always have the same background elements.  Like a dude with a cowboy hat.  Why not put him with an oversized cowboy hat?  Or instead of a leather jacket have him have a diamond plate leather jacket.  Or even better - a buffalo leather jacket.  How about that?!  I think that would be twice as awesome.

Like in Back to the Future instead of having an awesome car that travels, they should have it be a Unicorn.  Keep all other elements of the film the same.  Just swap the car with a unicorn.  You feed the unicorn garbage and then it has a flux capacitor that turns it into unicorn fuel and it takes off at 88 mph.  It will be awesome.  So much more creative than a Delorean.  Everyone's first thought when they saw the Deloreans was that they'd make awesome time machines.  I was at the New York City International Car show the year it came out and the first thing the guy next to me and I did was look at each other and say, "Time Machine?"  And then we did that whole jinx thing that everyone thought was cool.  Turns out it wasn't. 

Anyways, unicorns are cool.

Storage Units - Your New Home!

Do you live in Atlanta?  Do you live in a house?  Do you pay for things like rent and air conditioning and heating?  Forget that man - it's time to move on up.  Moving on up!  Not to the west side, into some storage units.  If you can do it right you could have two neighboring units.  Use one for a bedroom and one for an office.  Sure you won't have electricity, but you can always run things off of batteries.  That's the great thing about storage units, they are square - that's cool.  They have a solid, resilient floor - also cool.  Their walls are often corrugated steel -super cool.  And they have an awesome neighborhood feel.  This is why people love storage units.  They are the best of all worlds.

Number one complaint about living in apartments - Go.  Do you know it?  Can you think of it off the top of your head?  Anything?  Something?  That's right.  It's the neighbors.  Well, because no one actually lives in storage units these days, no one ever complains about their neighbors.  The only neighbors there are to speak of most of the time are rats, and lets be serious; rats are everywhere. 

So move on it.  The first 30 days are free.

Brakes? I don't know what those are, why? Are they important?

Garage doors can be an investment.  The kind of investment you'd like to stay where it is, in the condition you put it there in.  The first time I visited my friend Kyle's house after school in Orient OH, his dad had just put in a couple garage doors.  Not the normal short ones, these were on this separate garage thing and had to be 12 feet or so.  Prior to purchasing the garage doors he had made the mistake of buying his daughter - Kyle's little sister - a motorcycle.  Not a bullet bike, but a dirtbike type motorcycle.  She could ride it, she just wasn't so good at stopping it.  You know, that's something only more advanced riders ever get to learning how to do.  She was still intermediate.  She had chosen to use the garage to stop her.  While the doors were down.

Unfortunately for me, I showed up right around the time that Kyle's father figured this out.  The problem with the dissemination of information in this circumstance was pretty simple; you see he didn't find out she hit the garage until he already knew that she wasn't hurt.  So there was no parental instinct protecting her.  It was just the instinct to protect your garage doors that was present when this happened and that didn't bode well for her.  Kind of was.

Moral of the story?  Don't buy your kids things.

An auto repair for an auto body

Last year I was in a full pursuit.  I was looking for a company to buy and all I cared about was that the financials were strong.  It could have been in Springville OH, or Sioux Falls SD, or Los Angeles CA.  I had ended up on a auto body shop.  Honestly I didn't know exactly what an auto body shop was entirely when I started looking at it.  I knew it wasn't an auto repair shop, at least I thought I knew that.  But turned out it did do some auto repair work when it could, and of course an auto body shop's main business is - you guessed it - fixing the bodies of autos that get in accidents.  Still, in any business there are nuances.  There are places money may be coming from, or going to that you might not guess if you don't understand the business specifically.  So I called my friend who owned an auto repair shop.  I knew he worked with auto body shops in the area, and had done so for decades, so regardless of just how versed he was on auto body, it was going to be more than I was.

It turned out I didn't buy the business.  It was good but it was going for a million and I came across something more in my field and a bit more in my price range.  It looked perfect.  But within 6 months, I would have lost both...

Fargo

Most things get bad when they get personal.  Like injury.  Like personal injury.  Before that injuries aren't that bad.  Like an impersonal injury.  Say, for example, my neighbor who I don't know well gets hurt, I think that falls under an impersonal injury.  Many times less inconvenient than a personal injury.  Like in Fargo, when Carl gets put into the wood chipper?  That's a very personal injury for Carl.  It's about as bad as it can get for him.  Now for Gaear it's not as personal.  In terms of an injury, Gaear is doing pretty good.

Of course there are different types of injuries, not all physical.  And Gaear may be experiencing a great trauma in an emotional type way.  Could be very emotionally damaging.  After all he is going to jail it would appear, and that has been known to traumatize a person.  There is isolation, and new people, and violent people potentially, and of course non-violent people can quickly become violent people in extreme enough circumstances.  It's just a matter of needs.  I mean generally speaking violence for most people isn't a rational solution.  They see a myriad of other solutions that are more tempting and rational than violence.  But for most if not all, at some point violence may become very rational.  Protection of family, or protection of self.

Let's contract some electricity.

There are a bunch of different types of contractors.  Take electric contractors.  They are normally the best kind.  I mean they deal with electricity.  Electricity is almost an other-worldly phenomenon.  You can't just contract that stuff and not be good.  Is that what electric contractors do?  Contract electricity?  I'm not even sure what that means.  I know what to contract means:

an agreement between two or more parties for the doing or not doing of something specified.

And we all know what electricity is.  Either way, electricity is cool, so electric contractors must be as well.  I think the best form of electricity is lightning.  I used to live in Syracuse New York, and that was my first time really seeing lightning.  We didn't get it like we got it in Ohio, but it still was something.   


Did you know that lightning regularly is 6 to 8 miles long?  Like it travels that far from earth to cloud?  And you can hear it sometimes from 12 miles away?  And check this out, a lot of people get struck by lightning while the skies above them are still clear, lightning can break the cloud perimeter and just reach out and punch you in the face. (figuratively of course)  


Anyways, try not to get struck by lightning.  It could hurt.