It's intoxicating when you have a "lightbulb" moment in business. Watch a trend, see a pattern, hear the same things said over and over and eventually you can't ignore it.
For me, that's recently been the concept of Operators-as-a-Service. Here's my progression of thought:
Rising chatter of acquisition entrepreneurship
Ease of discovering and buying startups
Popularity of Micro PE
SMB buyouts by long-term employees
Increased demand in buying digital businesses by those outside the ecosystem
Want investment diversification
Often don't have any domain expertise
Partnerships between business brokerage platforms and listing websites
One party has fresh companies to promote
The other has buyers frothing at the mouth
I engaged interested buyers and discovered...
Most don't actually want to operate
Appetite typically ranging in transaction size from $50k-$500k
I engaged interested sellers and discovered
Many actually want to maintain ownership
Willing to get creative to hold and grow for larger exit in future
Very positive about revenue share agreements that don't touch cap table
So...at internetexits.com we have started to more frequently promote the OaaS concept and both buyers and sellers are responding with significant interest.
But how does it scale?
We're beginning to build an army of operators. Connor and I will oversee operators, but we know we cannot and should not do it all ourselves.
Still in the early stages, but I'm very bullish.