Good morning,

Nine of you responded to the survey in last week’s update about partnering on a business.

I’ve had several conversations since and more on the way. (If you completed the survey, I will reach out to you.)

Here’s what I’m learning: I love the idea of connecting amazing business owners with amazing operators.

What does that mean for me for Mike Buys a Biz? I’m not sure, but I’m excited to know there’s a lot of legitimate interest from capable partners.

The trick is finding the great businesses, and that’s where I’m still focused for the time being.

My goal progress is stuck at 2.5.

Let’s get into the update.

What happened when I sent more emails

I used to research and send each outreach one-by-one. A few weeks ago, I realized this is a goal-killer. There’s little chance I’ll hit my yearly goal of 12 relationships at the pace I was working.

So I asked Merry, my amazing VA, to start doing the pre-outreach vetting.

And she crushed it!

I reviewed ~50 websites she researched and vetted, and agreed with 95% of her judgments (i.e. whether the website was worth contacting or not).

The natural next step was to ask her to draft outreach emails, too. The results are good-not-great. 

Here’s what I’m learning:

• Sending the email from a Filipino IP address produces a lower open rate. Now, Merry will draft the emails and I will hit send so it comes from my IP.

• It’s downright near impossible to ask a VA to draft a personalized email from you. Many of my custom emails mentioned a random connection point between me and a business owner that the VA doesn’t have context for.

• Sending mass email results in a lower response rate, but you can get more responses (duh) because you send more email. I haven’t calculated the numbers but would guess 10% of my personalized emails responded and ~3% respond to an unpersonalized email.

Now that I’m sending more unpersonalized email, I’m thinking hard about professionalizing my email address and website. The email you’re reading this on, mikemclean154@gmail, is the same email I use to reach out to owners.

My theory is the personal email may appeal to the owners I want to reach than a professional email and website. Maybe it comes across as authentic.

The owners I’m targeting are tired, off-market, and skeptical. They’re skeptical of private equity and suits. At least that’s what I think, because I haven’t tested it.

Here’s the question: does mikemclean154@gmail generate more or less responses than mike@somedomain?

Let me know what you think: 👇

Next week

I have ~120 emails scheduled to go out over the next week to 60 individual cold leads. I anticipate I’ll get 3-4 responses from those.

Next week I might share some (non-anonymized) websites I reached out to that either (1) didn’t respond or (2) didn’t work out. It might be interesting to see some of the actual websites I find so you get a better idea of who I’m targeting.

Have a great week!

Mike