The Double Exit - Fastlane Founders with Matt Raad - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

Matt Raad talks with Jason Barnard about the double exit.

Matt Raad, the CEO of eBusiness Institute and Website Investor, discusses the concept of a “double exit,” where entrepreneurs can grow a business using their personal brand and later exit without diminishing the company’s value. Matt reveals proven strategies for acquiring, growing, and selling websites.

Jason Barnard and Matt Raad also discuss the challenges and strategies for businesses heavily dependent on personal branding when it comes to exiting, with a key highlight on the discussion on transitioning personal brand-centric businesses to new owners. Matt underscores the importance of planning and communication, suggesting collaborative efforts between buyers and sellers for a seamless handover.

Learn how to identify undervalued digital properties, transform them into profitable assets, and execute successful exits while preserving brand value. Jason Barnard and Matt Raad conclude the episode with an assurance that even seemingly tricky personal brand transitions can be managed effectively.

What you’ll learn from Matt Raad

00:00 Matt Raad and Jason Barnard
01:21 Matt Raad’s Brand SERP
01:35 Liz Raad’s Brand SERP
02:01 Jason Barnard Highlights Matt and Liz Raad’s Google Learn About Result
03:40 What Does It Mean to Flip a Website?
03:48 How Long Does It Take To Transform a Website Into a Profitable Exit Opportunity?
04:03 What Does eBusiness Institute Do?
04:14 Who are the Ideal Professionals Seeking to Transition Into Digital Entrepreneurship?
04:23 How Do Professionals Learn to Build Profitable Digital Assets While Keeping Their Jobs?
04:48 How Long Has eBusiness Institute Guided Professionals Toward Digital Entrepreneurship?
04:58 What Does it Call When a Business Sets a Bold, Ambitious Goal for a Multimillion-Dollar Exit?
05:31 What is the Strategy for Turning Neglected Passion Sites Into Profitable Assets?
06:46 What is the Term for Buying Good Websites Under $5,000 and Transforming Them Into Six-Figure Assets?
07:14 What Can a Business Do if They Want to Turbocharge Their Website Renovation Beyond Standard SEO?
08:19 How Does a Low-Cost Website Renovation Turn It Into a High-Traffic, Revenue-Generating Asset?
09:25 How Can Someone Profit From Acquiring Passive Income Websites Without Being an Expert in the Niche?
10:41 When Should Entrepreneurs Start Planning Their Exit Strategy for Personal Brand-Based Businesses?
11:10 Why is Rushing to Sell a Business During Burnout a Critical Mistake to Avoid?
11:21 How Do Entrepreneurs Systematize Online Personal Brand-Based Businesses for Successful Exits?
13:21 How Do Successful Entrepreneurs Smoothly Transition Ownership to New Buyers?
14:15 How Long Should Entrepreneurs Stay Involved When Transitioning Their Business?
14:56 How Do Entrepreneurs Introduce New Owners to Search and AI Assistive Engines According to Jason Barnard?
16:45 What Does a Business Owner Need to Do to Ensure a Smooth and Successful Exit Strategy?
19:28 How Can a Business Owner Ensure a Successful Handover When Selling a Passion Site?
22:25 What is the Primary Focus for Buyers When Acquiring a Business?

This episode was recorded live on video January 28th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-raad/recent-activity/all/
Matt Raad

Transcript from The Double Exit – Fastlane Founders with Matt Raad

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy. A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Matt Raad.

[00:00:43] Matt Raad: I love it. Thank you for having me on, Jason. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:47] Jason Barnard: Yeah, Matt, you’re all the way over in Australia and we actually almost met because I met Liz, your wife and business partner.

[00:00:53] Matt Raad: And business partner, that’s right. And she interviewed you many years ago for our community, which was awesome.

[00:00:59] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. And today, stick around because we’re going to be talking about The Double Exit and Matt Raad is the double exit guy. It’s going to be really, really interesting and using your personal brand to build a business and then exit with the personal brand intact without decreasing the value of your company. I’m really excited to hear about that because I think it’s something that’s incredibly important. But here we go. Before we start, here is your Knowledge Panel on Google and when you search your name, you look like an absolute superstar, which means your digital footprint is relatively well organized. And we see a lot of Matt and Liz Raads. So I thought I’d look up Liz as well.

Hers is more difficult to find. If you search a name that doesn’t pop. I actually had to dig into our data in the Kalicube Pro database to find Liz’s Knowledge Panel, but that’s looking pretty good. And if you look at the top there, if you know what generative AI is, AI overviews, that has been around for four or five years and that is generative AI. Knowledge Panels have been full of generative AI for four or five years. So at Kalicube, we’ve already mastered it. And this is the good one. That’s Google Learn About. And I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

It’s in America. It’s an experiment. And this is where the world is going. You can see here it’s a learning experience. It’s understood who Matt and Liz Raad are. It’s understood that you’re all about buying websites, optimizing websites. It explains all about you, gives some opportunities to listen to you, gives some explore related content and then follow up questions. What are your main business interests and how did you get into Internet website flipping? And that, if you look at it, is a funnel.

I start with your name and it’s going to draw me down the funnel and it’s going to convince me that you’re a superstar if you’ve organized your digital footprint correctly.

[00:02:44] Matt Raad: Wow.

[00:02:45] Jason Barnard: But that’s not the topic for today.

[00:02:47] Matt Raad: Well, it is kind of because your listeners can use that funnel. I’m just sitting here thinking, wow, we could, you know, with websites, online businesses, you can, you should be using that sort of a funnel for any online business that you have. And as you said at the beginning, that can add to the exit valuation down the track.

[00:03:07] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:03:08] Matt Raad: I think that’s super important, what you just showed there. For any online business.

[00:03:12] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, what was interesting is a couple of years ago, Fabrice Canel from Bing, who builds Bingbot, and when they released Copilot was saying, actually what we’re doing is building the funnel. And we’re building the funnel, bring the user down the funnel to the perfect click. So you’ll get less clicks, but the clicks you get will be straight to purchase.

[00:03:32] Matt Raad: Oh, nice. Okay.

[00:03:32] Jason Barnard: Isn’t that cool? Anyway, onto your topic, which is you help white collar workers learn to buy, build websites and then flip them. And flipping a website means selling it onto somebody else. Who do they generally sell the website to and how do they build it up?

[00:03:47] Matt Raad: Well, it takes time. Flipping makes it sound really quick. And I’m sorry, for any listeners, I know you want to hear the magic stories of. And we do have plenty of stories of people that have bought them and flipped them. But what you’re right, Jason. What our passion is is teaching people how to buy websites effectively, do really good due diligence, and ideally get out of their nine to five or typically these days it’s five to nine. We typically work with high performance people, professionals earning a lot of money, so that journey takes a little bit longer to replace their income. And we teach them digital skills.

We love SEO, even though SEO’s changed dramatically. And what the journey looks like is we get them basic skills first and then we get them started to buying small little sites so there’s no risk they can still keep their daytime jobs. And they do it as basically, it’s a very American sound term, but it’s really effective. Do it as a side hustle. And we found that that worked really well. We’ve been doing this for now, teaching people for 15 years. Fifteen years we’ve been teaching people and we love it, absolutely love it. And we’ve got amazing clients and but a lot of our clients do have what we call the BHAG, the multimillion dollar big hairy audacious goal, the multimillion dollar exit.

[00:05:08] Jason Barnard: Right. So we’ve got our white collar worker, they built up a website and you’re saying they build it around community, a unique approach and their own personality, which means personal brand is hugely important.

[00:05:22] Matt Raad: Well, what we’re teaching now, this is really interesting because SEO has changed, we’re teaching that now. So where you start is a foundational side. What our actual strategy is, and to this day it’s still the same strategy, is find what we call fallen angels on neglected websites. But ideally they’re passion sites. So they’re passion sites that someone set up many years ago around golf or cooking or guitar, learning how to play guitar. So that, and I know to someone that’s not online, you probably, we can’t make much money out of that. If you’re listening to this, you should see what you can make out of these simple guitar sites. Or we’ve got a client that bought a pet site that makes $300,000 a year, bought it for a million dollars and within six months they doubled that to 600,000 just off Adsense.

It’s a passion site around pets that was set up 14 years ago. About 15 years ago someone loved pets and dogs and things and they. On Autopilot, they’re making 300 grand easily they just left it. And so our client came along, obviously high net worth, bought it for a million dollars and renovated it and, and built that up. So what we teach is to find these passion sites. And by the way, you should not be looking at a million dollar site if you don’t know what you’re doing. That would be silly.

We, we you can actually buy. If you’re listening to this, you might be shocked to know you can buy perfectly good websites for under $5,000 US and you can literally turn them into six figure assets over a period of one to two years. And what we’re saying, what turbocharges that renovation, we call it buying and renovating websites, is if you can start to put in some of this, I guess like what you’re getting people do, Jason, is personal branding. When I think it through, I think what you’re doing with your clients is, is what we’re trying to say to people is look, if you want to turbocharge renovations website, it’s not good enough these days to just do Standard SEO. We need a bit of branding in there and you don’t have to be the subject expert. We have plenty of clients. Can I share one really cool example?

[00:07:33] Jason Barnard: Go ahead, show a cool example.

[00:07:35] Matt Raad: Okay, so Nathan Alexa, they’re actual coaches of ours. They do this. They buy lots of. We call them portfolio sites. They buy these passion sites. They’re laptop lifestylers. They bought a gardening site here in Australia. It was about native Australian gardenings.

You’ll like this. Anyone that’s into SEO will know what I mean here. They were doing outreach for backlinks and they contacted this guy because they own another gardening site and they don’t know anything about gardening. They just have two writers who are experts in gardening who write these sites. They contacted this guy and they said, oh, we’d love to get a backlink, but hey, we noticed you haven’t touched the site in over a decade. Are you still using it like you’re doing anything with it? Would you be interested in selling? Said, no, I’ve forgotten about it. You can. So he said, all right, I’ll sell it to you.

And they bought it for $400. This little now, that’s an asset in and of itself. Just the domain name and the content, genuine, real content. So when it hits spring now here in Australia. It now gets this little $400 website gets because they’ve renovated it. It’s taken them two to three years, but it now gets over 80,000 visitors a month. And it’s making four grand a month. And so that’s from renovating the website. Now what they’re doing, particularly after the last year, it did get impacted in the Google Update because of how it was set up.

So they’ve been implementing basically EAT signals or this more personal branding. So now Nathan is featured on there. They’ve got a team of writers. They get asked to speak at gardening conferences and things. And Nathan’s kind of stuck because he’s like, what do I do, Matt? I’m not actually a gardening expert. But he’s built up the profile around it. And that’s just one of, you know, they think that’s a semi passive website. That’s one site.

They’re really excited about that site, by the way. But they own other sites around the same. So for a young couple, when you earn four grand, you only need ten websites. We’re talking a significant income each month. And that’s basically the dream scenario to find those old sites that are real, they’re passion sites. They’ve got genuine content on there, actually real and then we build them up. And typically, Jason, I think what you want to get to is like what a lot of your clients are finding. Obviously a lot of those older sites are built around someone’s personal branding.

And that’s where I love that. I don’t think it’s as difficult as people realize. People freak out about that. It’s actually not as hard as you think.

[00:10:02] Jason Barnard: We talk to people who say, well, I’ve built up my company, it’s grown, it’s successful, but my personal brand is too important and I can’t sell it, I can’t exit. What do you do about that?

[00:10:16] Matt Raad: Yeah, so that, so we. So if you’re listening to this, my background, along with Liz, my wife, we’ve bought and sold businesses for the last 30 years. And we also were M and A brokers ourselves doing deals up to 20 million. And even with bricks and mortar businesses, we saw this all the time. So businesses built up heavily around the owner. So if you’re in that situation and even if you’re a startup and you’re starting to build a business, my advice is start thinking about the exit from day one. But especially if you’re at the point where you are thinking about exiting, you want to do a big sellout somewhere or a small sellout doesn’t matter. The main thing is, even if it’s built around you and your personal branding, as long as you’re thinking out in advance, don’t just the worst thing you can do is I’ll tell you what not to do.

If you’ve got a business built around a personal brand, don’t just suddenly decide to sell it because you burnt out or whatever and try and sell it within 30 days. That’s not going to work. What you typically need to do is plan it out at least a year in advance. And there’s simple things you can do no matter what the business is. But particularly with online businesses, you can start systemizing things so the key roles so an investor or a buyer can look at it and go, okay, there’s a large element of the personal branding, but then there’s also a large element of the day to day running. This is run by a team. So notice an example I mentioned with Nathan Alexa just then. Even though Nathan’s featured on there and it’s been hugely successful, he’s not the one that actually run, he’s not a gardener, he doesn’t write any of the articles, he doesn’t do the day tech.

His main role with that website is project managing and keyword research, good old fashioned keyword research. He just does that once a year. So that is a very saleable asset. And he can easily show someone that he’s been bringing in other. They can be pseudonym people so they don’t even have to be as such real like they can write under pseudonyms. But realistically you’re best off just hiring people experts. It’s easy to do in passion niches. Way easier than you think.

There are always someone that’s willing to be a guest poster on your website in return for well you just outright pay them but in return even for the links and things. And we’ve done that a lot with clients getting ready, building up a team of regular say other bloggers who come onto the website. But the main thing is start planning a year out. And what we also do is when you go to sell the, when you do sell the business, it’s funny, big buyers or any buyer, people freak out. They think I couldn’t sell a business that’s based around my name. You would be shocked at how many seven and eight figure deals we see that are based around the name. So there’s a site right now you can go and look at.

It’s on Flipar. It’s called Greta’s Travels or Greta’s Travel. How do you say the name? Greta’s Trav. It’s obviously built around Greta. She’s a travel blogger. And everyone goes and full disclosure, it’s actually not selling. I think it’s overpriced. But it’s around one and a half million dollars for sale right now.

But there won’t be any problem a bigger buyer coming in and buying that because they’ll just introduce. What you do is you do a transition period. So typically and we used to do this bricks and mortar businesses. You just don’t introduce yourself as the new buyer for straight up. And that’s the main trick. You just as long as there’s a six month or ideally a 12 month kind of. It’s not a handover as such, it’s just gently introduce the new person. So typical way you’d do it with a website is say it’s Greta’s Travels.

At some point on your about page you introduce the new editor which is secretly the actual buyer and it might be Joe blogs and then he starts blogging on there as well. And then over time you just start getting Joe to make it more obvious that he’s got more of a role in there. And then at some point Joe will say oh wow, this site is so cool. I’ve taken on a senior management role, I’ve taken equity in it and then six months down the track you can start introducing Joe as the actual owner and the co owner. And as long as you, if you’re the entrepreneur that owns the website, you just help, you’re willing to stay on and help the new buyer transition over a 6 to 12 month period, then it’s a lot easier than you think. Not to say it’s perfect, but it certainly can be achieved. We’re seeing literally sites held for tens of millions that are based around a particular food blogger. And the brokers are telling me they sell them, no worries.

That’s basically how you do it. Introduce a team and also you introduce the buyer over a period of six months.

[00:14:46] Jason Barnard: Well, I mean kind of what I hear there as well is you’re introducing the buyer as the new editor and then eventually the new owner to the people. And what we would do at Kalicube and my immediate reaction, my brain’s going around saying now we need to introduce it to Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity. And that’s where we would be useful.

[00:15:07] Matt Raad: That could speed it up. Actually, that’d be really handy for if there’s any big, any of you doing seven and eight figure deals here that, that’s, that would be really, really handy for a big buyer. So there’s a lot of private equity and corporate institutional money now buying up these passion blogs for seven and eight figures that if you could show them a plan where hey, okay, the site’s built around my name. Greta’s Travels. But in as part of the handover I recommend you get Kalicube to help build up the positioning of the new owners. And you know, out there too there’s some famous, some of you, if you’re a bit more advanced you would know the names like dot dash and some of the, you know, they’re buying up content sites and they’re transitioning absolutely fine. Many years ago when we started teaching people how to buy and sell websites, we used to feature a site called Dave’s Garden because it was one of our competitors and Steve’s Digicams, it was Dave’s Garden. Go and look it up.

It’s still to this day it was bought by Internet brands. It’s still to this day it’s one of the top ranking sites in that niche Internet brands were in all the niches we’re in and they just buy up sites that were clearly built by hobbyists. They go, Dave, lucky him, he did a seven figure exit, but it was built around whatever his last name was, Dave’s Gardens. To this day, it’s one of the top ranking sites in the gardening niche. The transition. No worries. Absolutely no worries. So, and you obviously you, you gently change the about page and all that sort of thing.

[00:16:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah. So it’s a gradual process. I think kind of, as you were saying, people are looking for immediate exits, immediate success. And that’s.

[00:16:44] Matt Raad: No, don’t do that. No. And, and even if you’re exiting. Yeah, we, when it’s branding. That’s brings me to another point. Thank you. Another big tip for you. You’ve got to think about who’s going to buy this business and you want to make sure you get on with them because if both of you want a successful exit, ideally you do it over six months.

Actually, I could share another example. We’ve got a client right now who bought a website called. I just featured it today. I see, I see hundreds of websites literally, like I’m always doing due diligence. What’s it called? It’s, it’s a girl’s name and it was bought by Ashleen, who’s a client who we coached to do this. And it’s called Emily Makes or something like that. And it’s a crochet site.

So Ashleen is not a crocheter and she’s not called Emily or whatever the girl’s name was. Sorry, I’ve gone blank on the name.

[00:17:36] Jason Barnard: Emily’s fine.

[00:17:37] Matt Raad: Emily’s fine. So when she bought this site, she bought it for $18,000 and it’s making around 500 bucks a month net. His net profit. And when she bought it, she’s renovated it, fixed up the funnel and she’s got it up to a thousand dollars. But on one of the coaching calls with her, what I said to her was, how well do you get on with Emily? Because this site is genuine, it’s real, it’s built around Emily. It’s awesome. And she just wants, she’s a mum of four kids in Utah, America. She wants to move on and do other things.

And Ashleen said, oh, Emily’s really nice. She’s a real deal. She’s really nice. And Ashleen’s in another state of America. I said, if I were you, there’s such a good website, I would either get on an airplane and find an excuse to go and have a coffee with her and sit down and just keep her involved for the next six to 12 months. At the very least, after we get off this call jump onto Zoom and have a chat with her and just see, because Ashleen had. She’s new to this. She hadn’t even thought of that.

She just had that 30 day standard 30 day handover. Said, no, no, no, no. Emily sounds like such a nice person. You two get on well together, have a chat to her and see if she’s happy to stay on, even just as a guest writer for the next six months or the next year. And guess what happened? Emily is over the moon about it. She’s a mum, she wants to. She built this website, it’s her baby. She immediately said to Ashleen, because Ash.

I told Ashleen, don’t ask her to do it for free. Pay her like $30 to $50 an article or whatever the article costs her in time, whatever she asked for. I think it’s like 60 bucks an article, just once a month. And that’s enough to keep Emily still involved in the business. The clients, the visitors to that website are more than happy. And that site, I can say, has transitioned absolutely beautifully. And now Ashleen is into crochet as well, so that’s going to help down the track. But the point is, most owners, what we find is, with passion sites are more than.

And if you’re listening to think about it, you’ve built this site, you’re the startup entrepreneur. Why, why wouldn’t you stay involved for another six months or whatever? That’s when you get the perfect handover. So. And whilst that’s a small little site, it’s been really successful as a handover. No one really knows it’s changed hands yet. They don’t even have to update the about page. Ashleen’s now featured very heavily as one of the contributors and she’s made it clear that, you know, she’s got a major part in the business, but that’s transitioned just absolutely perfectly and. And that’s what I highly recommend, recommend you do.

[00:20:08] Jason Barnard: Right. And I mean, overall, in terms of the personal brand and how you’re presenting, it’s all about communication. And once again, that communication through the site to keep the audience transitioning from one person to the other. And it’s absolutely doable, but presumably true for bricks and mortar businesses too.

[00:20:26] Matt Raad: It is, yeah. So that’s where I learned this. Many years ago, when we were helping people buy and sell bricks and mortar business, we specialized in selling wholesale import and manufacturing businesses and larger ones in Australian terms. So they’re in a multimillion dollar range, up to about 20 mil. And even with a wholesale import business, it was obvious that the business businesses there were certain businesses that really did revolve around the owner. Like he had all the paper. I’m thinking of one in particular. I remember when it first happened, this guy was importing stuff from China, but he had all the personal relationships not only with the suppliers, but also with all the customers.

He knew them back to front. And that’s going to freak out buyers, particularly bigger buyers, like private equity firms and stuff. And these are cash buyers. And so I put them together and we. What you gotta do is be upfront about it and say, look, he’s. As a result, we understand he’s got all the personal relationships is very. This, this is going to be tricky. But the vendor, as let’s call him John, is going to stay on for the next 12 months if it’s the right buyer and you make the right offer.

And then you can also bring in, if you’re a buyer, you can bring in like, well, actually, if you’re a seller in this market in particular vendor finance or sort of a structured deal, I recommend that as well. So that gives safety to the buyer. And it’s funny, when I first started seeing that, even me as a business owner, because we bought and sold our own manufacturing and wholesale import businesses, you do as an entrepreneur, really worry that you’re the one that’s built this thing up, you’ve got all these relationships, but I can’t tell you how many times these businesses transfer effortlessly. It’s rarely a problem. And one of my mentors said to me many years ago, this is a guy, that very wealthy individual in Sydney, and he was a really good mentor for me, actually taught me everything about buying and selling businesses. And he said, Matt, people worry way too much about this personal branding. At the end of the day, if you got a big buyer and the business has got, they’re going to look at the P and L and the balance sheet. If that’s healthy, we will find a way to make the deal work.

And as long as both parties are reasonably happy, you can always do it. And there is always a way. And he’s right. People freak out way more. You want to know something else, Jason? Here’s what I used to see. Another mentor who buys and sell business said, watch for this, Matt. When the big corporate guys come in and the private equity firms come in, they buy these businesses that you think revolve around the owner. You know what they do.

Typically after six months, they get rid of them anyway. They don’t care.

[00:23:06] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:23:07] Matt Raad: They’re secretly behind, like in the background. They can’t wait to get the original owner out and just move on with it and pump it. And so he said, you got to watch that with the corporates because it can upset the outgoing owner if it’s their baby and stuff like that. We actually had a friend of ours that did a big eight figure exit and he was telling us that’s exactly what happened to him. Within six months, the corporate made it very clear we don’t want you around anymore. Even though there’s all this talk that it’s going to transition out. This business literally revolved around him at the time and they just said, no, don’t care, move on. You’ve done your bit for the six months.

So if you’re listening to this bottom line, it’s not as bad as what you think. There’s always a way. There is some business which are a bit trickier. But what we’re seeing these days with online businesses, I think the big buyers now, they don’t care if it’s a personal branding like Greta’s Travels or Dave’s Garden or whatever, it’s relatively easy to transition out.

[00:24:05] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. That’s a great conclusion. Thank you so much, Matt. You get the outro song, a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Matt and thank you everyone for watching or listening. Bye bye.

[00:24:22] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.