Good morning all,

I’m romantic about farming. I love the ethos of farming: subduing the earth and caring for it while providing for your own.

One of my first ventures was chicken farming. I ordered one-day-old chicks online and they literally showed up at my local post office. Here’s picture proof from 2015.

Why am I talking about farming?

I’m taking the generous leap to compare this venture to farming.

Reaching out to owners, responding to emails, and writing handwritten notes reminds me of planting seeds.

Most seeds will die. Some seeds will sprout. Some sprouts will yield more than I can imagine.

My job is just to plant, water, and wait.

The waiting is the hard part.

Good farmers are great at waiting.

Who I’m waiting on…

I’m cultivating several relationships at once, as you know from my open CRM.

The CRM only shows you businesses I’ve already vetted as good opportunities.

What you don’t see are the businesses I’ve reached out to, who’ve shown interest, and for one reason or another we haven’t connected yet.

I have three of those in my pipeline right now.

#1 A job board with a bigger opportunity

I found a job board in a very well-known, super high-end niche: think something along the lines of yachts.

We scheduled a time to talk, and each of us had to reschedule once. That’s a momentum killer.

But when I asked for a time to reschedule, he said:

The “entire company” is the job board + an online course. Very interesting opportunity.

I’ll be reaching out on June 1.

#2 OG education resource

Remember Blackboard, the software teachers use to upload their curriculums? This business owner helped build Blackboard, and their personal project, in an adjacent space, is still up and running. The business is almost 30 years old.

When I asked her questions around users and revenue, she said she had to check another computer.

The computer died that week, and she wasn’t able to get me the info.

This owner is in their mid 70s, which makes resurrecting the computer and retrieving the data more challenging.

But, they say their working on getting me answers to my questions and want to discuss. Not sure what could be in this scenario, but there are enough good signs and unknowns to continue pursuit.

#3 Skeptical agency owner

I got a response from a cold email that looked like this:

Totally reasonable response. In fact, I like this response. Most people with businesses worth nothing are not skeptical of someone interested in buying it!

Conservative owners with solid businesses are skeptical. They have something to protect.

For example, the owner of the ecom store I’ve talked about a lot (I’m calling it “Black Coffee” for easy recall), requested I send them a LinkedIn, resume, and three references before they sent me an NDA to discuss their business. I’m glad I persevered on this one — it’s a great business — but almost didn’t multiple times.

Now that I better understand owner psychology, I like opportunities where the owner is a bit skeptical.

I’m taking some time away

You won’t see an email from me next week or the week after.

I need some time to recharge, reset my focus, and love on my family.

I’ll be back on March 13 with an update on how that went!

Until then—

Mike