Podcast 169: How Jaryd Kraus Went from Plumber to Website Portfolio Owner through Website Acquisitions

I had the opportunity to site down and interview Jaryd Kraus from BuyingOnlineBusinesses.com. 

Jaryd is a big believer in skipping the “failure” as he puts it and just jump to the success by buying a business that is already making money.  

During this podcast we discuss why Jaryd (and how) went from being a plumber to making 3 website acquisitions that led him to investing in websites full-time.  The first acquisition really allowed him to quit his job.

He's now build a portfolio of sites and helps others do the same.

We discuss the best places to buy websites, including EmpireFlippers.com and MotionInvest.com. We also dive into how you asses risk when looking at a potential site to buy.

Topics and Resources Mentioned:

• Flippa
• BuyingOnlineBusinesses.com
• EmpireFlippers.com
• MotionInvest.com
• Income Store
• Exchange Marketplace
• Long Tail Pro

As always, feel free to leave a rating or review for the Niche Pursuits podcast right here.

Read the Transcript:

Spencer: Hey, Jaryd. Welcome to the Niche Pursuits podcast.

Jaryd: Hey, Spencer. Thanks so much for having me on. It's great to finally connect.

Spencer: Yeah, definitely. It is very good to have you on the podcast. We've followed in similar circles, previous to recording, we're talking about Rhodium Weekend and Doug over at Niche Site Project. I know we've got other mutual connections as well, but we've really never connected on a call here so it's great to have you be able to hear your story.

Jaryd: Yeah, thank you. I'm looking forward to it.

Spencer: To give people an idea of what your background is, where you came from, what were you doing previous to ever building any online businesses?

Jaryd: I was a plumber. I was at school, I tried to do advanced math, and I just got kicked out because I was not very good. Then I realized all right, “Alright, I'm not going to be an accountant or have this office-type job,” which is quite different from what I do now. I just realized that I want to make some good money. In Australia, at the time when I was leaving school, plumbers and electricians were the highest-paid and were getting really good wages.

I started working as a plumber, doing my apprenticeship whilst I was still at school, so I'd work two days a week—Tuesday and Friday—then I'd go to school on three days, and then eventually came out, and that took some time off my apprenticeship and that just led me into being a plumber. I grew up through that into supervisory roles and running bigger jobs in hospitals, shopping centers, and stuff like that.

Spencer: It sounds like you were doing just fine as a plumber. We can talk about whether or not that's the most exciting work but what made you decide to start an online venture?

Jaryd: The money is really good. This is the paradox for people in Australia who do have decent jobs—and I guess the same in America—is that it's hard to leave unless you have a really big motivation to get out of the industry or get out of your job. My motivation was, “Yes, I was making some good money, but I was working ridiculous hours and it was physical labor.” I also drive an hour to and from work, sometimes an hour and a half. I’m spending 6 days a week, 3 hours a day, 18 hours in the car.

I found myself hating it and then I'd run away. I'd get to a point after a year and just go, “I'm young, I've saved up some cash, I just want to go travel and enjoy my life.” Then through traveling, that really led me to go I don't want to go back to plumbing. I literally, at one stage, I found myself in Egypt. I was doing my dive to become a divemaster. I realized, “Alright, I need to have a goal,” and that was to travel the world and make money.” I just literally jumped on Google. I guess so many people have done and typed in how to travel the world and make money online and that's what led me to this space.

Spencer: Nice. What did you find from that first Google search? How long did it take you to actually build some real income online?

Jaryd: I found that people would travel blogging. I thought all right, this is it. This is my ticket out of here. I started travel blogging much too what a lot of people mention how hard it was to make money from it, just as it grew, travel blogging, the income got distributed between so many people. I didn't really make a whole lot of money. I think I started earning money after an eight-month period or something like that. I did start earning small amounts of affiliate commission stuff in the first year, but it never really went to a stage where I could live off it and travel around the world at all.

Spencer: The first attempt to travel blogging, you probably learned a ton. I think we probably all learn a lot with our first business or first website, but it wasn't a massive success. Maybe you can bring us up to speed to where you're at now, how did you go from you tried building this travel blog online but now—not to reveal the ending to everybody—but you're no longer a plumber and you've done some successful things online.

Jaryd: Yeah. Long story short, I went through the stage of realizing that 90% of startups fail and it is quite hard, there's a lot of work to get to that point where the income is coming in quite well. It's either you do a lot of failures to get to a point where you learn a lot from them and then you strike gold with one of you startups or just try and cut that out which is what I did. I found this website called Flippa and thought, “Alright. Cool. This is great.” Then I found proper brokerage websites and I started buying sites. I bought one and then another replacement income. Then I kept buying them and went off traveling.

I owned multiple sites, was traveling, and actually not seeing my bank account get drained which was quite cool. Then from doing so, a lot of people just started reaching out and said, “Hey, Jaryd, you need to teach me this stuff. I want to get in and buy some sites and stuff.” That's where I segued into teaching people. Then as you see now, what I have is I've got a community of people that I work with, they come in, teach them to buy sites safely and without risk, and make sure they can grow them as well, to scale them and either flip them or hold onto them for something that can be semi-passive.

Spencer: Perfect. What year was it that you bought your first site?

Jaryd: I bought my first site in 2014. That's six years ago.

Spencer: It sounds that went decent, at least; it went well enough for you to buy another site. Were you just using all your own money from savings to do that?

Jaryd: I'd started saving from quite a young age and I had some money that I had in the stock market. It just wasn't going great after the 2007, 2008 crash stuff. I took it out and then I went, “Alright, let's look at this. Is it going to give it a better return?” I started putting some money into that. I've always used cash from my sites.

The first one, it built up a bit of income. I was still working as well so I was saving a lot of my money through work and had that other income stream. Then I bought another one. I had two sites whilst I was doing an expansion of a shopping center as a plumber. I had three income streams at one stage.

Spencer: What size of acquisitions were the first couple of sites you did?

Jaryd: The first one was $15,000 and then the second one was about 3 times that. Then it just kept going from there.

Spencer: Awesome.

Jaryd: Smaller ones to start off with.

Spencer: About how many acquisitions have you done to date?

Jaryd: I bought three sites and built a couple of other ones as well.

Spencer: Okay. You still have the original three sites, or have you sold?

Jaryd: No. I've got two of them and I don't have one of them. I may be selling one, if not both of them, in 2020. I'm expanding into buying more businesses with other investors and stuff like that as well. There's going to be a cool little venture that will be coming and getting released in 2020.

Spencer: Awesome. Just to give a big picture portfolio look, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like at this point, you've acquired three sites that you're growing. Did you say you have two sites that you built from scratch?

Jaryd: Yeah.

Spencer: Then you have, of course, the buyingonlinebusinesses.com brand. That's the overall portfolio of businesses that you're working on and managing right now.

Jaryd: Yeah.

Spencer: Are you willing to share any success numbers from any of those websites to give us an idea of how well your businesses are doing?

Jaryd: I don't really talk income as in per month dollar amounts and stuff like that. I did get quite lucky with the second business I bought. It was in a men's apparel and we're doing tailor-made clothes. When I first bought it, I didn't realize they had gone from a transition from offline to purely online. I had a lot of success when I first bought it—this was in 2015 when I bought this one or mid-2015—I started scaling it. Just by doing a lot of content and changing a few things that I'd achieved, and I guess a bit of luck where they already had existing customers come on board, the customers are returning customers just due to the quality, I achieved a 100% return in 7 months on that site.

I was just like, “Wow, this is ridiculous. I need to just put all my chips in.” I know now that it's non-typical. If everybody listening, it's pretty amazing results. A lot of it does come from luck, a little bit of work, of course, but that's not something that I'm going to be banking on trying to achieve from buying sites in the future. I say that to my clients as well is like, “Yes, I've achieved that which is great although that’s very non-typical.”

Spencer: Right.

Jaryd: As you know as well buying sites yourself.

Spencer: Yeah. You shouldn't expect to double your money in seven months every time, but that is the attractiveness of this business is that, that is possible.

Jaryd: Yeah. The multiples are a bit lower as well, especially from 2013, 2014, 2015. After that, that's where multiples really started ramping up a bit more. I've spoken to a lot of people—people that you probably know as well—that had got into this even earlier than me and just the multiples that they were paying is crazy like three-month, four-month, six-month multiples. It’s crazy.

Spencer: Things have definitely changed a little bit over the years. I think we're seeing the market mature a little bit going from extremely low multiples to almost more standardized. There are certainly still deals to be made out there but if you look at the brokers that are out there, the multiples tend to stay within a certain range for the most part now.

Jaryd: As the industry report, the Empire Flippers do, that has a pretty good scale of the different multiples for different business models which is quite good. I think it's a good resource for a lot of people because it helps buyers know that, “Alright. This is what I should be aiming for to purchase something up,” rather than going hardcore on the bargaining. This isn't an undeveloped country where we should be bargaining for these deals.

Spencer: Right. First of all, congrats again. I mean, being able to quit your job and being able to travel. Are you doing a lot of traveling or do you mostly stay at home in Australia?

Jaryd: Yeah, thanks. I think just to come back to being able to quit my job, I still feel like that's one of the biggest achievements I'll ever achieve. It's a big goal for so many people. I still look back at that and like that's an amazing achievement for anybody to do. There are still going to be bigger things that will come and already have, it depends on people's opinions of that, but I still think that's a really cool thing. It’s so achievable now especially for a lot of your audience that is listening. I think that's quite a cool thing.

As for travel, I really use travel as an escape mechanism to run away from my life of plumbing. I got mixed up in partying a lot as well. It was a great tool to remove myself from that. Now, I do travel with my partner but it's definitely not the type of traveling that I was doing on a shoestring budget backpacking stuff. I spend most of my time in Australia because I actually really love work. I live in a great spot where I can surf every morning. I don't feel the need to run around and tick things off the list in the travel sense.

Spencer: You've figured out a career path or a business that's working for you. You enjoy doing what you're doing. I think that's great. To come back to buying businesses, the age-old question is, why is buying an online business better than starting one from scratch?

Jaryd: That's a great question. This is completely my opinion and everybody else is going to have their own opinion. There are two parts to this. The best way to learn about business is to be in business and when you start, there are a lot of loops that you've got to jump through, a lot of heartaches, and a lot of failures that you need to learn from. They can be skipped and purely, if you just want to have success to make money, they can be skipped and you can go to a whole new set of lessons and problems to solve as a business already is earning money. You can skip that whole startup failure rates.

The second part of it is that 90% of all startups fail. It's really, really hard. I know that you've started building businesses and when you first start, it's quite hard to really understand, “Alright, that doesn't work. I put a lot of time into that; a lot of money into that.” You can always earn more money but you're not going to earn more time. We're never going to get that back.

There's so much that we need to go through to get to a point where it's ticking over. It can be even somewhat passive or even if you're working 40 hours a week for it and it's making an income, it’s a lot of work for it just to get to that stage whereas when you buy a business, you can have that as soon as you hand over your cash. It's already a proven system, it's already making money, it's already got all the data there. That's why I love it and that's why so many of my clients love it.

Spencer: The reality is that building an online business can be great and it can work but it does, it takes a long time. It might be a year or two years or never before your business is making any significant amount of money. There are a lot of question marks surrounding it. If it works, and that's a big if, sure, you could start it for a lot cheaper. Maybe you could put in, pick a number, $10,000 or $20,000 if you call that your investment, and potentially, you could build a site that's making $2000, $3000, or more thousand dollars a month if you hit a home run and everything goes really well.

Jaryd: I think it's also that once you start to learn how to build these businesses as well, then you definitely have more chance of success because you've learned so much more. For me, I feel that I would have struggled and ran around in circles for many more years if I hadn't have started buying sites and never really learned the whole house to start one properly.

I think what I was quite lucky to do is buy sites and realize how the successful ones are built by owning them and then being able to build them myself personally because I know what it should look like. The same as you, I know that you've started things and as you keep going and you start more and more, you know what needs to go into building something that's going to be solid and going to work.

Spencer: Absolutely. Actually, that reminds me to follow up on a couple of sites you built, how have those gone? Once you've owned a few sites that you purchased, have they been successful, the ones that you built yourself?

Jaryd: No, not really. I definitely struggled with them and this is before I started buying them as well. I built my blog, a travel blog, and that made some money, it wasn't really good. I got a lot of exposure to the online space through that. It was definitely one of the best things that I did because it taught me so much like you said. Then off the back of that, I built a business that was in drop shipping. I came home from one of my trips. I just caught up a bunch of suppliers over a month and created this drop shipping business. Little did I know, I needed to get traffic to the site and be good at digital marketing to get people to actually purchase.

I didn't know anything about SEO. I didn't know anything about content creation except for writing a few blog posts. I knew a little bit of a few things but nothing to get something like a drop shipping business to scale. I didn't even know how to do a Facebook ad or a Google ad at that time. That's all the stuff that I learned through businesses that I had bought, and got quite good at digital marketing, got quite good at sales, understood SEO a lot better.

Then from building something in a niche that has momentum already and then adding my skills into that, then I've had more success. Especially with Buying Online Businesses, that site is a site that I have built and a business that I have built from the ground up, it's had great success but only because of all the things that I learned from businesses I owned.

Spencer: That makes a lot of sense. For people that are interested in maybe going out and buying a site, where do you think the best places are to go buying an online business? Should people be going to Flippa, Empire Flippers of the world? Are you finding private deals? What are your thoughts?

Jaryd: Yeah. It really depends on people. It's quite hard to find a private deal when you first come to this space unless you tap into a community where there are private deals getting thrown around. It really depends on what people are wanting to spend and how quickly they want to ramp things up as well. Personally, I think it's not the greatest place to go to Flippa or Exchange Marketplace when you're first buying sites because there is a lot of junky listings on there.

Blake Hutchison who's the CEO of Flippa, he's coming on a summit that I'm hosting, and I've had him on the podcast. He agrees, there are a lot of things that need to be filtered through. There are so many stories that you would have seen as well, Spencer, especially on these marketplaces where people don't know a whole lot and they just get taken advantage of. For example, even just yesterday, I had a call with one of my clients. He's looking at a site from Flippa. I was like, “Do you even see these things that I'm seeing?” It was his first site that he's doing due diligence on. He didn't see it at all.

If people are going to go away and do this by themselves, just a lot of caution, just at least learn as much as you can through due diligence before you go to any of those. People forget how good brokers actually are, I feel. Brokers definitely vet businesses and this is why I love brokers is because they have their brand at heart. They have a brand; they have their best interest at heart. Them having their best interests at heart means that they should have the purchasers’ and the sellers’ best interests at heart because they don't want to destroy their brand, they don't want to have bad case studies, they don't want to have flak come back from bad things that happen.

Unfortunately, sometimes there are people that buy businesses that are doing perfectly fine and run them down the drain just because it may be their first purchase and they don't know that it may not have the skills to run that particular type of business model. But to answer your question, I believe definitely going to brokers as your first port of call for the first business you may buy is the best way to go.

The hard thing that I see is that there are people that want to jump into this, and they just want to dip their toe in the water in this buying online business space. As it grows, bigger money is coming into the market, making the sites a bit more expensive than most people that come to the market. That's why I love some ventures that are opening up, especially like yours, what you're doing with Motion Invest, and Jon and Kelley, is that there's a massive market there where people want to buy something sub $50,000.

They want it to be a decent asset without having to deal with the likes of Flippa and Exchange Marketplace where they could get taken advantage of quite easy because they grain in the space. I think what you're opening up with Motion Invest is awesome. Then where people want to segue into bigger deals then they can go into bigger brokers and list things up to the $20 million.

Spencer: Yeah, obviously. I agree. That's exactly what Jon and I saw with Motion Invest is just there's this gap in the marketplace. The brokers want to do bigger and bigger deals even Empire Flippers, they started in the smaller space but they're certainly scaling up. They've built a great business and make more money on the seven-figure deals. Kudos to them for being able to do that. But it does leave a void a little bit in the marketplace in terms of smaller-size sites like $50,000 or less or even $100,000 or less can be hard to find on other brokers.

Jaryd: They sell so quickly as well. I was speaking to Alex the other day. These $70,000 businesses are selling within seconds and it makes sense for Empire Flippers to sell start selling bigger businesses because their team is expanding so much; it's costing them more and more money to sell these smaller listings but when you have an approach like you guys where you can be really streamlined, you guys can do well and the people who buy them can do well as well. As you said, there's a massive void there.

I love where you're not just building a business, you're solving a problem. That's why you guys are going to do well. I love that there's that available for people who are jumping into the space because a lot of my clients go, “Hey, Jaryd, I want to buy a site, and this is how much money I've got.” I say, “I'm glad that you've come to me because if you're going to go away and spend that money on Flippa and Exchange Marketplace, and you don't know what you're doing, then you’re going to get taken advantage of.” But where else is there that they can buy something that's going to be decent from reputable people?

I'm glad that you've got that happening because it means people can start off with $10,000 like I had, or a little bit more or whatever and then slowly start. It means this gives more people the possibility to start something that's eventually, in a few years’ time, going to allow them to replace their income. That's my ethos. That's why I actually started what I'm doing is that I want to make sure other people can get out of something that they don't like. The main goal is to spend time with the people they love like friends and family. People have kids and stuff like that. That's why I got into it and I think that you're just opening up that space or filling in that void where those people can start by dipping their toe in the water. I think it's great.

Spencer: Yeah, thank you. Like you already expressed, there are a lot of people that don't have a lot of experience in vetting websites and noticing what the risks are. They just see a listing on Flippa, like you said, and they’d say, “Hey, this looks like a great deal.” They may miss some things just because they haven't been in the industry for very long. Anyways, that's what we're trying to do at Motion Invest is we vet all these deals, obviously, we own them already. We believe that they're good businesses. That's why we're willing to do that.

To move on past that, I do want to hear some of your thoughts on how you assess risk? When you're looking at potential deals, what are red flags that you're looking for when you're trying to buy a site?

Jaryd: Let's talk about how I assess risk, but I love that you bring up the phrase ‘red flags.’ I want to touch on how important it is to understand what a red flag actually is. This is my opinion and version of a red flag: a red flag, some people believe, Spencer, is that it's something that has been raised and they go, “I've got to run away from this. I can't invest in this because it's got too many red flags.”

A red flag, in my opinion, is where you see a risk but don't run away from it. All risk is minimized by education. That's why I started what I do is to minimize people's risk. To minimize your risk is to educate yourself on what those actual red flags are because it could just be a problem that is an opportunity in disguise. Does that make sense?

Spencer: That does make sense, yeah.

Jaryd: When it comes to looking at different types of risks, it could be a PBN. Speaking to the content side theme, it could be a PBN and a lot of people raise a red flag of like all right, this is a risk. Don't just run away, understand it first. A lot of people run away from PBNs. Maybe you could purchase that PBN, that may not be on somebody's actual radar, maybe you could get some specific agreement that PBN kept linking to the site because it's got a decent amount of traffic.

It could even be that if I understood why the traffic is coming from those PBN links—I'll explain what a PBN is after for the audience that they don't already know—but if that decent amount of traffic or why they're coming from a PBN to the site that you're looking at buying, understand why, create those articles, and get the traffic organically because if you understand this risk, then you can either minimize it or just completely remove it and then benefit from it once you do that. Does that make sense?

Spencer: It does make sense. I agree, a red flag isn't always a stop sign. Sometimes it's just a warning, or like you said, if you understand the potential risk there a little bit better, there may be a way to mitigate that if you truly understand it.

Jaryd: A PBN, I think, most of your audience would know, a private blog network. The sites are just linking to a site that you may be buying. There are so many other different types of risks as well. It could be with SEO. If we stick to what happened last year in 2019 with the changes and updates from Google where they had penalized different types of niches—whether you want to call them industries, health, and stuff like that—is understanding that red flag is and if it did get hit by an update, why did it happen? Is it because they are writing content about a specific thing that may be not within the ethos or values of what Google wants to share with people? If so, can you remove that content? That's how I analyze risk is I just want to find out more information about it, keep asking why has this happened, and how can I remedy this?

Spencer: Right. I think that makes absolute sense; I think that's good advice there as well. I wanted to ask you about the deal size. You've touched on it a little bit but two parts to this question: one, what do you think is a good deal size, maybe explain how you might help clients determine how large of a site they should be looking at and then the second part of that question is financing. Do you believe that people should be taking out any type of SBA loan to get a larger deal etc.?

Jaryd: Yeah. Very good questions. There are more questions, they’re higher-level questions, and you'd need to have more questions to go deeper into very specific answers, but we'll keep it broad. The first one is deal size and that really depends on what that person's actual goals are. I personally believe that it depends on how much work they want to do. If they want to buy something and really learn a lot about the business and a lot about the space, then buying something under the $100,000 range is great because you're going to be able to roll up your sleeves and learn a lot, not just in creating content, the SEO digital marketing, depending on the business type.

That type of deal size, I believe, is good for people that really want to create a foundation that they can use which is a skillset and different particular types of skill sets to create a portfolio and build that portfolio themselves. There is the option to buy bigger deals and have experts come in. I still believe it's good to understand how the experts actually work like SEOs and digital marketers. You don't want to hire somebody that you can't actually check their work because you don't know what's going on.

Above $100,000, I believe, that's a good deal size if you want to have something that is a bit more passive. Normally, in my opinion, if you buy something over the $100,000 or over the $500,000 range, yes, there's less work because you have more income, you can pull levers, and you can have resources, also it's harder to shake. I've spoken to Dom Wells about this from OnFolio. We used a tree and a bush analogy, when you've got something that is big as $1 million or in between $100,000 to $1 million, it can be a tree that's harder to shake and harder to get affected by any weather conditions that may happen. If you buy something sub that, it's easier to get blown over or pushed aside by any conditions that may happen online.

I believe that the higher you go; the risk can be minimized. But then again—I want to be cautious how I say this—but there are also always risks and it depends on the business type and model and all that stuff. Does that help with the deal size in my opinion on the best deal size for different folk?

Spencer: Yeah. I think that helps people understand where you're coming from and that approach. It sounds like, at least, the first two deals that you did were sub $50,000-ish and the last one was a little bigger?

Jaryd: Yeah, just a little bigger; it wasn't hugely bigger. Then as I go on, we’ll definitely be buying bigger businesses as I join with other partners and stuff like that.

Spencer: Yeah, talk about that a little bit, joining up with other partners. Do you have anything in the works? What would that look like? You’re just pooling money and you're going to be the operator? What deal structure would that look like?

Jaryd: Sure. I've got a lot of interest, like I said to you before, you guys have definitely not just gone away and created a business with Motion Invest but you've solved a problem. A lot of people are coming to me with funds and they either don't have the time to operate a business and run it or they just don't have the skills. They're saying, “Hey, Jaryd, can you just buy me a business and run it?” That's been happening for quite a while. I haven't put myself in a position where I'm ready to do that justice for the investors that come onboard.

I don't want to just start something up that's going to be a half-assed—excuse my language—because as we've all seen in this space, the news that's happened as of recently, if it's not done well then it can affect a lot of people. That's just not how I'd like to operate. I want to make sure I do it the right way. In terms of how we're doing it, it will be released throughout this year and I've already got a shortlist of people that want to jump on. We will be buying businesses where we will be operating them and interest on people's investments will be distributed between investors, whether they're shareholders or whatnot, we're still solidifying how we're going to structure the fund but it's looking towards it maybe a share structure. Then if we sell it above what we sell, it will be a split between investors and operators as well. It will look like that.

It's a pretty exciting process and it's pretty cool to see how much money actually out there and how much help is actually out there as well. I don't want to get dollar signs in my eyes because I know that when you start adding a lot more value, that a lot more money can come. Although I'm just really excited by connecting with some pretty amazing people who are potential operators, executives, consultants, and stuff because there are some great people where everybody can benefit from the pie if you just get the right people on the bus.

Spencer: It's a super interesting space. I guess just to clarify for listeners, you were talking about news, you're referring to Income Store. People can look that up if they want, some recent news with Income Store. But you, talking about getting investors and there being a lot of money out there, that is absolutely true. There are a lot of people that are very interested in this space and don't have experience in this space per se. There are also a lot of people that do have a lot of experience in this space and are still looking to put their money somewhere because they're busy with their businesses. They would like to invest more across the space.

I'm pretty familiar with several different groups that have done this, of course, Wired Investors, which they no longer exist but anyways, long story short, the first deal they did was they bought Long Tail Pro from me for seven figures a few years ago. They bought a number of other deals, but doing something very similar to what you're talking about using investors and then they're operating the businesses, it's a really, really interesting model that I think, if done correctly, can provide both investors and the operators tremendous returns for sure.

Jaryd: That's exactly right. If done correctly in terms of scalability, you'd want to set something up the right way. It's like the feedback wheel that a lot of billionaires talk about. The more that gets put into it, the stronger it gets, not the weaker it gets. Using that feedback and setting up the right way. Not just if it's set up the right way but I think a big part of it is by whom as well. It's hard on the online space to really gain a lot of trust with a lot of people. But I think you've got to do your due diligence into who's doing what, why, what's their actual motivation, and what's their care factor for the people who are actually involved.

I think that's a huge thing because when things can go belly up, an operator is going to do what's in their best interest. I look at the Income Store thing as well or is it going to be the opposite way around? Will the captain go down with the ship or will they abort type of thing? That's why I feel anybody that's investing in anything is just to understand who you're actually investing with.

Spencer: Yeah, I agree. Try to be as educated as possible, who, and just understanding the risks in general. As excited as I am about the online space, and building, and buying online assets, I'm also extremely aware of the risks involved. I think we all are. It is a risky asset class. Google can change their algorithms and traffic can disappear overnight; those things do happen. People do need to be aware of risks. That's why it's important to talk about red flags because there are certain ways to mitigate risks.

As long as you understand what all the risks are going into a deal then by all means you can do that. I think that's, again—not to keep bringing up Income Store—but that's where they went wrong is they really made bigger promises than they could keep, try to make it sound like there wasn't as much risk as there really were with their clients. That got them in a lot of hot water.

Jaryd: Yeah. If it sounds too good to be true.

Spencer: Right. You can’t guarantee a return, that's just not feasible to do. Very good. The one last question I wanted to ask is you mentioned that you have clients a number of times, can you explain what is available to people on buyingonlinebusinesses.com? How can people work with you or what you offer there?

Jaryd: Yeah. This was created from the whole, “Teach a man to fish versus give a man a fish,” which I'm sure a lot of people know about. I much rather teach people to fish so they can eat for the rest of their lives rather than give them one meal of one fish. That's why this was created where I want to make sure people can go away, invest, create their own path, and also not be alone in doing so. A lot of people say their entrepreneurial journey is lonely. I just think that's a stupid myth which is just so freaking dumb, let's be honest here, it's just so stupid. Why do you have to make it alone?

Spencer: Right. There are so many other people, especially in our space, with some of the bloggers and other people doing the same thing, it's really easy to reach out and connect with people.

Jaryd: Yeah. It can be fun. You can have great success and deal with a lot of people. Normally, that's needed for a lot of good people to have great success. How this was created is that a lot of people were coming to me, “Hey, Jaryd, I want to buy a business.” I started to get really good at research and due diligence. What I started helping people to do was like I used to have a program where I just taught people due diligence, now what I actually have is a community where people can get that whole program and course, but they also are connected with a bunch of other people that are in the space buying sites, selling sites, and scaling them.

The goal is to really help people buy sites and build them up so they can create their own portfolio with minimizing their risk and being around the right people in doing so. I help actually do due diligence reviews for people to make sure they're not going to go away and buy a lemon. That's a very valuable thing for people is that they want to buy a site and a lot of people reaching out is like, “Can you just check over this stuff for me, Jaryd?” That's a huge value add to people is where I've looked at so many deals, I can quickly and easily spot things and say, “You've got to check this first.”

I don't actually have all the answers. Most people, when it comes to investing and how they feel about the investment, they have the answers. I'm just really good at asking questions. When I'm a mirror for them and when we're equipped with a bunch of information through due diligence, that can be very, very powerful, also mixed with the community of people that have great skills and knowledge in buying and building sites as well. That's what it is. People could just pay a monthly fee, or they pay an annual fee and they can become a part of the community and go down that track.

Spencer: Yeah. Awesome. If people want to follow along with you or even get in touch with you, they can go over to buyingonlinebusinesses.com. Jaryd, it's been a pleasure having you on the Niche Pursuits podcast. I love it when people have a great journey. You've gone from being a plumber to now an online business portfolio owner, manager, and doing very well. I appreciate your words of wisdom and coming on the podcast.

Jaryd: Thanks so much for having me. I greatly appreciate it, Spencer.

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