Email Paused
I have been super busy this week, and will update everyone on my search progress in the next post. I am super excited about the progress made this week and can barely wait to share it with you.
Just to update everyone on the email outreach campaign before I paused it from being overwhelmed with potential deals that mostly were not worth considering, but required significantly more time to respond to than passing by a listing on a site, such as BizBuySell. This time difference was mostly associated with my philosophy of providing the broker with candid, specific feedback as to why it did not work for me.
Emails sent - 300
Emails responded to - ~ 32
Of which, 4 responded in follow-up
Overall response rate was >10%
The longer email had twice the response rate
Broker phone conversations - ~13
Brokers identified to never work with - 3
Brokers who asked to be removed from my list - 4
Brokers who were focused outside my search criteria -3
Brokers who insulted me personally - 2
Takeaways and plan moving forward
What I learned was that the longer email not only had a much better response rate, it made everything easier. Most of the responses on the shorter ones wanted the info that was in the longer one, thus making more work for me. The lessons learned in the Email Report Card all still hold true, and will be implemented in the plan moving forward. I absolutely should have put a sentence about not looking for buy side representation in there. One final lesson learned was that I think it wise to segregate Florida business brokers, and make that email even more specific that I am looking for their listings and only their listings.
What I am not sure about is whether this method is truly upstream, as described by Walker Deibel? Some brokers said they would put me on their list, but there hasn’t been enough time to see if that is bearing different fruit than a filter setup on Bizbuysell. One broker who I had evaluated his Bizbuysell listing in early February, has been sending me updates, but they are not pre-listed.