I've been searching for a business to buy for a while now. I've signed 8 NDAs with the intent to purchase a company. Every single one of them sent me P&L statements that did not match their tax returns.
Every single one.
The last one told me he was taking home $120k a year. When I got the tax returns, the business had a net profit of negative $15,000. That's not a rounding error. That's a guy who looked me in the face and lied about his numbers, hoping I wouldn't check.
This is the service industry. These are established businesses with employees, customers, and years of history. And the owners are cooking their books, inflating their income, and trying to sell a lie wrapped in a logo.
Eight for eight. Not one of them was honest about what the business actually makes. It's disheartening. I'll be straight about that. You go into this process wanting to find something real.
You sign the NDA, you get excited about the potential, you start imagining what you could build with it. And then you open the tax returns and realize the whole thing was a performance.
After the first couple, you start to wonder if it's normal. After eight, you know it is.
But here's where my head is now. If this is the competition, I'm not worried.
If eight out of eight business owners in this space are willing to lie about their numbers to a buyer's face, imagine what they're doing to their customers. Imagine the corners they're cutting, the promises they're breaking, the reputation they're slowly bleeding out while they chase short-term money.
These are the people you're competing against. That's the bar.
You don't need some revolutionary strategy to beat them. You don't need a better product, a bigger budget, or a smarter funnel. You just need to be honest. Show up. Do what you said you'd do. Charge what's fair. Deliver what you promised.
That's it. That's the entire competitive advantage.
It has never been easier to look amazing in business because everyone else keeps lowering their standards. They race to the bottom and then wonder why nobody trusts them.
Being a stand-up guy used to be the minimum. Now it's a differentiator. Think about how insane that is. Simply being honest, being someone who does what they say, is now enough to separate you from the majority of people in your space.
That's not depressing. That's an opportunity.
So the search continues. We stay in the fight. I know what I'm looking at now. I know what the landscape actually looks like, not the version people try to sell me. And I know that when I do find the right business or build one from scratch, the standard I hold it to will be what sets it apart.
We know our attack angles now. We pick up and march on.
This Week's Move
This week, I'm building a lead generation system for my own business search. I am sick of brokers sending me listings that look good on the surface but fall apart at tax time.
I'm narrowing my criteria, tightening my filters, and going after companies that match what I'm actually looking for before I ever sign an NDA. If the pipeline is full of garbage, the answer isn't to keep digging through it. It's to build a better pipeline.
What I'm Thinking About
I still believe AI is the biggest disruptor in the world right now. And not in the way most people talk about it.
I'm not talking about chatbots or AI-generated art. I'm talking about the person who learns how to actually use these tools and drops them into a small or medium-sized business that's still running on spreadsheets and phone calls.
That person is going to destroy their competition. And as I just spent an entire newsletter explaining, the competition is not exactly setting a high bar.
The people who combine real discipline with the right tools are going to run laps around entire industries. And most of those industries won't see it coming until it's too late.
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- Justin
