WP Buffs business acquisition unit

At the end of the day, WP Buffs is interested in purchasing businesses that compliment the rest of our portfolio.

The area we're strongest in is WordPress care plans.

We also love great WordPress content here at WP Buffs. If you run a WordPress blog that maintains strong content and drives revenue (through affiliate partnerships, sponsorships, etc) you're also probably a good fit.

If you run an agency that does mostly one-time projects and doesn't manage or drive a significant percentage of monthly revenue from subscription services, we'd still love to chat and learn more about your business to see if it's a good fit! 

Before we can make an offer or acquire your business, we'll need to take a hard look at your numbers and operations to make sure we're on the same page about how well the business is doing.

So that means a couple things:

• It's really important that you take the time now to get your financials and operations extremely well organized now.
• You'll also need to make sure you're comfortable with us (if we get to that stage) verifying through direct access to your payment transactions software, Google Analytics, your help desk and project management software, etc.

We'll sign an NDA to protect your confidential information, of course! If you have any questions about this, let us know ASAP. We're happy to discuss it as it's important we feel comfortable working together through this process.

Most final offers fall within a 1x-1.5x multiplier of yearly profit. This usually entails an initial payout with the remainder paid out within 2-3 months. 

This calculation of profits is done after any owner payouts, not before.

The offer and contract will usually be dependent on agreeing to a payout schedule, to share financial responsibility of clients who churn shortly after the acquisition, to work with us in the transition plan, to help when necessary with any official announcement plan, etc.

One of the signs of a strong business is that it can pay the owner a market rate for the "work" the owner does in the business. So if you offer maintenance care plans, the owner is paid for any support work they do. This makes the business more appealing to us to acquire, because if the owner is doing unpaid work we'll have to factor the costs of a replacement team member into your profit figure.

Some deals are worth less and some more, but this is most likely what you can expect with regards to a final offer.

Ex: If your business made $20,000 of profit over the last 12 months after any owner payouts, you can expect a final offer of $20,000-$30,000 (barring anything that significantly increases or decreases the worth of your business).

This entire process traditionally takes 8-12 weeks. It can be quicker for smaller deals or longer for bigger ones but expect to spend a 2-3 months communicating with us to see this deal come to fruition and 1-2 months supporting the transition.

The 2-3 months of initial calls, due diligence and offer negotiations will be a busy time for both the acquiring party (WP Buffs) and the selling party (you). 

The same goes for the 2-3 months after contracts have been signed, the sale is final and the transition work is being executed.

Our acquisition team at WP Buffs works extremely hard to make this an efficient and effective process for everybody involved and we expect the same from you. That means:

• fully reading and replying to all emails in a timely manner
• providing organized and accurate documents or data when asked
• tell us what your actual numbers are, including sales numbers, itemized costs, subscription metrics, etc (after an NDA is signed to protect your data, of course)
• understanding a slower process is sometimes needed around holidays, team time off, etc
• taking full responsibility over your post-acquisition task list (login credential handover, write up blog post, write email copy for your current clients, Stripe customer migration, etc)

In general, being easy to work with and making our lives easier will result in the best possible outcome for all parties involved.