#7 | Do I Really Have the Time to Own Another Business?

When I set a goal to acquire a business by the end of 2025 I admit there wasn’t too much rhyme or reason to the two-year goal. I guess I thought it would be too hard to find a business and close a deal in one year, and 3 years seemed like a long time to wait, so I went with a 2-year goal.

I think my wife’s first thought was, “Do you really have the time to own another business?” With 4 young kids at home and an existing and growing business in ProjectionHub it is a good question.

I think, in my mind, I figured that I would be able to find a way to reduce my responsibilities with ProjectionHub in the next two years, but I had no real plan on how to do that.

Business Coaching Forces a Process

I had already decided to hire a business coach, Tim Campsell, in 2024, but I didn’t really know what I was hoping to get out of the business coaching process. I figured that I would be forced to set some goals and that Tim could hold me accountable for those goals.

I am only 1 month into the process, but I think the process has already profoundly impacted my thinking. Tim’s goal is to help me build a business that can run without me. It doesn’t mean that it has to run without me, but that it can run without me.

So the first question was when do you want to try to get ProjectionHub to be able to run without you? It dawned on me that if I could get ProjectionHub to be able to run without me in 2 years, that would actually free up the time to make buying a new business more than just a pipe dream.

By stating that I wanted ProjectionHub to be able to run without me in two years, we then had to work backward to figure out what had to happen between now and then for that to be possible.

Although it will take a couple of years of hard work and some lucky breaks, I now actually have a plan in place that could allow me to get out of the day-to-day at ProjectionHub to open up the capacity to buy a business.

You may not need a business coach like I did to help you realize that more time isn’t just going to magically appear, but if you are looking to buy a business, you need to think long and hard about how realistic that time commitment will be and what changes you need to make now in order to prepare for an acquisition.

Valuing a Business

I thought I would just share one resource with you as well that I have found myself going back to time and time again. For most small businesses, I think the best way to value the business is based on a multiple of SDE (seller’s discretionary earnings).

But the question is what multiple to use?

I really like using BizBuySell’s industry multiple data which they publish for free here. They probably have about 100 different industries, but here is a little snapshot:

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You can find your closest fit industry and quickly get an idea of what multiple other similar small businesses are selling for based on the 10,000 small businesses that sell each year on the BizBuySell platform.

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