1926 – Unlocking the Secrets of Digital Entrepreneurship with Matt Raad

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

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1:06with us right now. It's Matt Rad. Matt, you are the CEO of eBusiness Institute and Digital Investors. You are a podcaster. So I always love to shout out when we get podcast guests, hosts as guests on this show. Your podcast is called Digital Investors, hosted with you and Liz, who's your wife. And you have a really great story. In addition to, you do a lot of great education. So Matt, I'm eager to learn more about the work you do, the impact you have. And of course, let's start with this great story that you have. Well, yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Josh. It's awesome to be here. Definitely a privilege to be on your podcast.

1:50Yeah, Liz and I are a little bit different. We generated wealth in our lives quite differently to most people, and that is through buying and selling businesses. It's all we've ever done. We generally have never really done a lot with real estate or anything like that. I know a lot of people use real estate to generate wealth, but for us, it was all about cashflow. So we started out buying and selling businesses. We met at uni studying zoology, knew nothing about business, and then got into our first manufacturing business. Absolutely loved it. Bought and sold bricks and mortar businesses for about 10, 15 years and then transitioned to online businesses during the GFC in 2008.

2:32And we've never looked back at just mind blowing. And that's why we're so passionate these days about talking, you know, buying and selling online businesses, which most people don't even think is a thing. They don't realize how, like Josh, you'll be blown away by how well they compare to bricks and mortar businesses. Oh, okay. Give us, give us your little mini Ted talk about how amazing it is to buy and sell online businesses? Well, so your listeners, right, are interested in financial independence and all things to do with business and maybe a side hustle. For us, we've been doing, put in context, we've been, I'm in my mid fifties, we've been doing this for 30 years, buying and selling all sorts of businesses, thousands.

3:14We've been, we've worked in M &A, we work with a lot of high net worths. We've basically seen every business model there is. And when we got online, we suddenly realized it was kind of our, we'd reached Nirvana, Josh, but Liz and I, so we basically are students of business, like out in the real world, we had to teach ourselves. And like I said, when we got online, all of a sudden, we had, we live in Australia, as you can maybe tell from my accent, we had access to America instantly. Now, in the past, we used to have to export to America physical inventory. So we had export wholesale import businesses.

3:55It's very, very difficult to run those if any of your listeners are involved in a business that holds physical inventory. Very challenging cash flow wise. But when we got online, all that went away. We have no physical inventory. We don't do e-commerce or anything like that. We literally just sell advertising or sell leads. And so we suddenly had access to your amazing country, America, which is our favorite place. We'd been there quite a bit and we could do it in our pajamas at home, whatever hours we want. We both come from the country, so we could live wherever we want. So we live on a beautiful property.

4:36And next thing you know, we're effectively exporting to America with no geographical barriers, nothing. And the really cool thing is, Josh, when we wake up in the morning, there's money in the bank account and we didn't have to speak to anyone. So for us, it was the ultimate location freedom business. And that's what we always wanted. Ever since I was a kid, that's what I wanted. It was all my dreams come true. So, Matt, take me through the kind of like the general process for how this works. Obviously, there's identifying a great opportunity, knowing that there's the opportunity to increase the value or certainly represent that to maybe a more targeted group to resell.

5:20Can you take me through the very high level life cycle of the transaction? So we liken it to real estate. Most people have invested in real estate and we do the same thing, but with businesses. So we buy smart, we renovate as quickly as we can. So we don't want to be completely pulling down the house and rebuilding it. We do what we call, I want to say that kind of an initial makeover and then we do an ongoing renovation. and what we're trying to do is increase the rent of the property through building up its presence and fixing up monetization and fixing up the traffic to the website. And so it's a set process that we do.

6:02And I think one of the keys is because most people have never heard about this concept or they've never bought and sold very many businesses like we have, what we're passionate about is, because we've made every mistake in the book, of course, is the due diligence side. So doing, you know that when you're buying any investment you should be doing due diligence if you're buying real estate commercial real estate a traditional bricks and mortar business with websites it's no different and the main things we look at are what's called profit and traffic we just want to make sure they're the you know they're real and then the next thing that we look at is opportunity because basically we want to buy renovate and sell much higher or for us we hold for the cash flow we like warren buffett we like to hold long term we're not into flipping, but you can certainly flip just like you do with real estate.

6:50There's a lot of our younger members would be into the flipping thing because they need to build up their bank. But for us, we're in it for the cashflow. Because Josh, the cashflows are amazing. The cashflows can be, you can get 80 % margins on these websites. Amazing. So what kind of websites are we buying here? These are advertising or affiliate sites. So they're not e-commerce. Because of our background in manufacturing and wholesale import, that's what we used to do before we got online. Both Liz and I made a pact with each other. We are never going back to that if we can help it, because all our net worth was tied up in warehouses.

7:33And then you've got to sell the inventory. And if you get a bit of a recession or anything like that, you can be stuck with a lot of inventory on your shelves and there's all your net worth sitting there and it can be tricky with stock-based businesses and they're not stock-based businesses and be blunt about it they're not good for beginners that you've got to outlay a lot of money there's a lot of complexities to them you can make a lot of money so the sorts of websites we decided to buy uh i guess they're like online billboards so someone has an interest and josh it can be really niche. Like there can be, we've got one about pigeon racing.

8:08We know nothing about pigeons, but it turns out there's 50 ,000 people a month are interested in learning how to race pigeons. And so when they come to the website, we sell them an ebook if for, you know, people that want to go to the next level with it. So we sell the ebook for 50 bucks. And to this day, you know, that's thing still ticks along making money. And, you know, we have sites that like a client of ours, here's the other big opportunity if you're into bargain hunting clients of ours nathan alexa they live on their laptop they bought a gardening site that had been neglected so the sweet spot is buying passion sites people that are start up these websites in their favorite niches like how to play a guitar or gardening or um how to get wealthy through investing all these topics that people are looking for answers to and we buy what's called content sites and so nathan alexa bought a gardening site that a gentleman had owned for 14 years and he just neglected it and they noticed he'd done nothing and they said how much do you want for that website and he goes oh just give me five hundred dollars so he bought it they bought it for five hundred dollars that thing now gets we've just come into um uh into the out of our summer which is gardening season here in Australia, it gets 80 ,000 visitors a month.

9:32Now this is of a little site that costs them 500 bucks. And it makes them$4 ,000 a month net. Oh my gosh. Well, I like this. You know what? Yeah. Sorry. And the way they monetize it is just by having ads. So gardeners will click on them and they get paid per click or they recommend products and get what's called an affiliate link. And that's basically the model. That's it in a nutshell. Yeah. How much work does that take? And tell me more about the remodeling aspect of this. Well, and now that's a really smart question. So in the past, these used to be quite passive and they were a lot more like real estate.

10:18Now what's happened over the last, since we've been doing this, we've been doing this now for 15 years. In recent times, it's not as passive. They definitely require work. And it's, there is, this is not a get rich quick thing. I know I'm making it, you know, like you said to me at the beginning, Josh, off the camera, that your listeners are sophisticated and, you know, they're happy to put in the work. Well, this is perfect because it's not something that you can just go out there and do what's called quick flips, in my opinion, to actually renovate a website. Realistically, you want to have six to 12 months to maximize the profit on building up that website.

11:00But it's certainly something you can do as a side hustle if you're already working, you know, a well paid job and everything, as long as you've got a few hours in the evening. So the beautiful thing with websites is you can work whenever you want on them, you can literally park them for a couple of months or for six months, You don't have to turn up nine to five and you can work wherever you want. Obviously just all you need is a laptop. And because most of the staff are outsourced, all that sort of stuff, you only need a handful of team members to help you, two or three. That's about it. And in terms of the renovation, we just do what's called a quick makeover.

11:34So when you first buy the website, you might tidy up the homepage, improve what's called the user experience. And we have our three systems that we work on. The main areas we target. So you kind of plan it out over six to 12 months and you just target fixing up the profit, fixing up conversions and fixing up traffic. And we call it the 30, 30, 30. If you dedicate getting those to improve by 30%, typically you can double the profits on a website. Oh, I get it. Because the numbers are so big. Even in these niche sites, like a gardening site or 80 ,000 people a month. Can you imagine that, Josh, walking into your store or walking into a business?

12:16That's a lot of people. And so that gives you a lot of data or potential customers to work with. And that's the other beautiful thing with websites. It's just so leveraged. Worldwide market, 24-7, they never switch off. So hopefully that answered your question. So there is work involved, but it's not like day-to-day. You don't have to. It's the opposite of nine to five. It's two or three hours a day type thing. And then if you want to go big level, we have clients that are doing seven and eight figures. They obviously work at it at full time because it's fun. It just keeps you young. Your brain never stops thinking because there's so much fun stuff you can do.

12:55A lot of it is research-based. That's where you make your big money actually is doing all the background researching and planning, the actual execution of the work. That's just, you don't do that. You outsource that. Yeah, right. Right. Well, that was kind of what I wanted to ask about is certainly is I think a lot of folks that are listening to this, they're like, that sounds great. I don't want to do all the work, but I know I know developers. I mean, that's easy. You know, I think, you know, what I'm thinking about and there may also, by the way, Matt, I don't know if you've had encountered this.

13:28I I have a website and I have not done anything to it probably for a good three years. uh it was huge in its day uh and um you know i didn't shut it down i just kind of it's there it's existing i get some very minimal ad revenue but i've just done nothing with it um it certainly is very well backed into um you and i should chat can you work with someone that says well i already i already have a property i just need some guidance on like direction on what i should be doing so those assets are the gold they're the sorts of things that we teach our members to find to hunt around and we call them diamonds in the rough sites like yours where see for you imagine if someone rocked up and said hey Josh I'll give you ten thousand dollars tomorrow for it you'd probably go yeah okay you know depending on the like the size of it and things like that you've got to work out the valuations but see how that it's a very common thing because what is it I think there's the last count there was like there's over two billion websites on the planet and only I think it's 25 % of them are active at any one time.

14:40So that's a lot of opportunity to find these diamonds in the rough that are sitting there, particularly when there's niche markets. And to someone who knows what they're doing, that's what we teach people, is, okay, let's capitalize on that. Let's refresh the site, get it going again. And you know what's really valuable too, Josh? Websites come with assets. So people think of websites as virtual, you know, like online brochures and stuff. Nothing could be further from truth. To us, they're just like a bricks and mortar business. Even though they're virtual, they come with what we call physical assets, inverted commas, like a list.

15:14Email lists are absolute gold at the moment because of the recent changes in SEO and what's happening with AI. Websites that have a list or a community behind them, So with a Facebook group or a YouTube channel or a podcast in particular, you watch how valuable all that's going to become in the next five to 10 years. And what you're teaching people, you know, around branding and authority and PR, guess what? That's what we say to people if you want to go next level with your website. So we teach people how to get started real basic, right? then what they need to do is go next level is to build out of a big presence online now if you want to go seven and eight figures realistically you need to do what you're teaching like you know get online pr that's a big that's why it takes time now to get the big wins and that's where we've seen some really big wins all right matt you and i are going to talk later and by the way Well, I've been intentionally vague here.

16:21So, all right, Matt, great conversation. Let's talk about where folks go. Obviously, there's Digital Investors, which is a podcast you can search for right now. You go to digitalinvestors.com, and that will link. If you click on the button that says free training, that will take you to your initial or your original website, which is ebusinessinstitute.com.au. But why don't we share where folks go from here? They've enjoyed our conversation or they've enjoyed your conversation. Maybe not so much, but where do they go from here? Well, if someone's listening to this and interested in what we do and exploring like more of this strategy, you can do our free masterclass.

17:01There's a 90-minute online masterclass. And at the end of it, we do, full disclosure, we do offer a course because that's what the eBusinessInstitute.com.au is about. And we do love training beginners to get online. And so in that free masterclass, we show real examples of sites that we're buying and our students are buying and how we're doing it. And we go through our three-step process of how we buy, renovate and sell websites. And yeah, just get in there and start. And my big advice too, if you're interested in this, whether or not you're doing anything with us, the main thing you should also think about learning is learning due diligence.

17:39It's an amazingly valuable skill for you, whether you do it with bricks and mortar or websites. I, of course, think you should do it with websites because it's heaps easier. And the beautiful thing with websites is you can start out really small. That's my other final bit of advice if people want to get going. Don't jump out there and buy these, you know, a website for$100 ,000 because it's making 30 grand a year or type thing or whatever. There's a bit you need to learn. It's a bit of a process. So just start out and buy a little tiny website under five grand or something like that to practice with.

18:07Yeah. All right. Once again, Matt Rad, you are the CEO of Digital Investors and eBusiness Institute. We have the links directly to our friend that's listening. And again, if you just want to hop right over and find a new podcast to listen to, you can search for Digital Investors. We've got that linked up as well. Matt, great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Josh.

18:39Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program. Please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders, asking them where their best business comes from.

19:21I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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