“I’d like to help you grow this business and acquire companies with no money out of pocket.” And in exchange, you’re going to receive 10-50% ownership.

we approached a mortgage broker and said, “Would you like to have access to 53,000 real estate agents to provide content and hopefully get mortgage business?” And the broker said, “Absolutely! We’ll do that $50,000 in a heartbeat.”

tailored your products or service in such a way as to provide continuing value to your customer, ideally while becoming virtually indispensable to them.

However, sometimes financing may be a contingency of closing the deal and if you want to make closing contingent on obtaining financing from investors (or even from a bank for that matter), you would want to build that financing contingency into the LOI.

we sold 10% of the company to Roland’s private banker and 10% of the company to his accountant for a total of $800,000 (20% of a $4 million company valued at 3x annual profits of $1.3 million). We had paid only $400,000 for that 20% though because we bought the entire company for $2 million. 20% of that $2 million payment price equals $400,000. Tha

“We build houses.” “No,” Jay said, “You provide the means to get people out of a substandard living situation and into a home where they can excel. You’re the catalyst for the growth of new communities, new friendships, new relationships. You’re allowing people to generate wealth, security, and longevity.”

innovation is coming up with new ways of adding value whose benefits are immediately self-evident to the market you serve.

“Is this something that you want to stay in as an operator, even after the sale?”

You could go to third-party investors and say, “Hey, would you be interested in investing in this company?” Now, you’d have to give up equity for that,