Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 13 with Justin Cooke of Empire Flippers

Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 13

[00:00:09] This is first reading of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where every week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we discuss what's going on in our business. Plus, we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week, we'll be talking to Justin Cook of Empire Flippers.

[00:00:33] Adult Site Broker is proud to announce Adult Site Broker Cash, the first affiliate program for an adult website brokerage with Adult Site Broker cash, you'll have the chance to earn as much as 20 percent of our broker commission, referring sellers and buyers to us at Adult Site Broker. Check our website at Adult Site Broker dot com for more details. First of all, today, let's cover some of the news going on in our industry in a case which may have consequences for cam models and sex workers who rely on a single platform for a majority of their income. A judge has ordered ride hailing companies Uber and Lyft to reclassify their California drivers from independent contractors to employees. The ruling would make Uber and Lyft provide the newly classified employees with benefits in accordance with the AB five legislation that came into effect on January 1st. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Shulman, who issued the injunction, also paused it for 10 days to allow for an appeal. The ride hailing companies are expected to appeal the judge's preliminary injunction in favor of the state of California. If upheld, the ruling could, according to Bloomberg, make them halt their services as they figure out how to adjust their business model to comply with it. Judge Shulman agreed with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra that Uber and Lyft are violating AB five. The legislation is currently undergoing a revision process in Sacramento via a follow up clean up bill outlining exceptions and states that workers can generally only be considered contractors if they perform duties outside the usual course of one company's business.

[00:02:24] The ruling may have an impact on California cam models and other sex workers if the state or the workers themselves decide to argue that their performances constitute duties that are essential to the usual work of a camming platform cam studio or premium platforms business. A.W. Media, the parent company of A.W. Summit, has spun off the show into its own entity, with Roxana Terrilyn named as CEO and co-owner. Earlier this summer, organizers postponed its annual event series in Romania to twenty twenty one due to ongoing concerns related to the pandemic. Roxana has been in charge of the company's recent shows, and she also came up with a recent A.W. meetup. Trilla expressed excitement about her new role. She said, I'm looking forward to take full responsibility of the A.W. Summit show that has been so important for our industry for over seven years. And I'm looking forward to leading our show in mimeo and to start the progress in moving A.W. Summit to Bucharest for 2020 to the Los Angeles Times has published several more accounts of alleged sexual assaults by Ron Jeremy. None of the new accounts appear to have resulted in more charges by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, which in June charged Jeremy with eight counts of sexual assault. Jeremy was arrested on June twenty third and remains in jail awaiting trial during his bail hearing on June 26.

[00:03:57] The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson of the Sex Crimes Division, justified the unusually high six point six million dollar bail his office requested by referring to the sheer number of allegations of what he termed sexual violence that have been named about Cheramie, some of them going back 30 years. Although the DA's office only found enough evidence to warrant charges over four incidents over a period of five years during Jeremy's arraignment. Thompson cited 38 allegations to justify his claim that Jeremy's freedom represents a risk and a danger to society, according to the Times article. Prosecutors said they had been contacted by 25 women across the country who made allegations ranging from misdemeanor sexual battery to rape against the man who for decades was one of the porn industry's most visible celebrities. Now, let's feature our Property of the week, let's say a little Adult Site Broker we're proud to offer for sale porn botsio, an amazing adult domain name, this domain can be used for just about any purpose, including a Paysite or a tube site porn dot com sold for nine point five million dollars. And the dot CEO extension is rapidly gaining in value. So besides being able to make money on this domain now, you can also count on it appreciating in value. This amazing domain has been reduced in price to only one hundred ninety nine thousand dollars. Now time for this week's interview.

[00:05:34] My guests are Dan Adult Site Broker Talk is Justin Cook, the owner of Empire Flippers, one of the top mainstream website brokerage companies in the world. Justin, thanks for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk.

[00:05:47] Thanks for having me on. Bruce, appreciate it.

[00:05:49] It's a pleasure. Empire Flipper's provides a marketplace that allows people and companies to buy, sell and invest in websites and online businesses. They offer an end to end concierge brokerage service for their customers and have done more than one hundred and thirty eight million dollars in total sales today, which is really impressive. Let me also say that Justin has an amazing podcast, The Empire Flipper's podcast. That was a good part of my inspiration to do this one. In fact, Justin was nice enough to have me as a guest a few years ago, so I decided to return the favor. Justin, how did you get started brokering the websites?

[00:06:29] Yeah, so my business partner and I, we've been friends a very long time back from like the late 90s.

[00:06:37] We were friends in Southern California and we were working for a company in space in California. And we were hiring people right and left. And so we had for a previous company we'd owned, we'd actually done some hiring in the Philippines.

[00:06:52] So we told our our bosses, the CEO and CFO, we said, look, know, we have this connection in the Philippines where we think we can hire some people to do some of this kind of back office work that you need done. So they said, yeah, let's roll with that. So we hired a couple of people and we started scaling that up, you know, scaling up a team in the Philippines. And eventually we went to them and said, hey, look, you know, we've got this you know, it's not like eight or nine people. Why don't we run the business over there? We'll leave our jobs here to go run the business and work as a company, a B2B company for you, running this from from the Philippines when they went for it. So my business partner and I moved to the Philippines to start an outsourcing company working for our previous employer.

[00:07:32] And, you know, we were really excited about this. You know, we traveled quite a bit before and we actually met and and not the Philippines, but Thailand before and had a really good time. And we always thought, you know what, if we could, you know, make dollars and spend pesos. And so we got the opportunity to do that. And we went over there. And then within a year, our previous employer had come up on hard times and started to come back. And so what we thought was a growing stable opportunity turned out to be something other. And we were looking to replace them and look for new clients and we were testing out different things. And what we ended up stumbling on was the creation of profitable website assets. And so what you do is you put up a website, buy a domain, put up a website, put up some content around a very specific niche, and then over time it starts to get ranked and starts to get search engine traffic. And you can monetize that. You can make money with it by putting ads on those sites. And so we start putting ads on and we realize we can make money building these small sites. So, you know, as our employer starts to scale back, we started turning those people to building these sites for us.

[00:08:39] So we started building our own sites to start. And then we realized there are people that are willing to buy these sites that are making money. So the site makes a hundred bucks a month.

[00:08:48] People want to buy those sites from us four to two thousand dollars, twenty five hundred dollars each. And so it basically started from us kind of creating, you know, finding that our new outsourcing company, our previous employer, was cutting us off, looking for another opportunity to keep our business afloat and then being able to create these little niche websites that made money and finding out people want to buy them from us.

[00:09:13] Just you certainly do the ultimate turning lemons into lemonade, sir, didn't you?

[00:09:19] Well, yeah, we were forced to write because these guys are like, OK, well, we're going to pay you half of what we were paying you last month.

[00:09:26] And we're like, oh, God. And so we did have to lay off some staff in the Philippines. But sure, with layoffs, like, you know, the first round's kind of the easiest, you know, like, OK, well, you know, there's always 10, 15 percent, 20 percent of people that, you know, maybe on the fringes, maybe kind of like one foot in one foot out, but then you start to cut deeper and you're cutting people that really want to be there, that are doing a good job. And we realized that we said, look, these are smart, capable people that we want to keep like we need to. Figure something for them to do, and we found something that worked, which is building these small profitable sites and that's kind of how we got started, was building sites for ourselves. Eventually, that process failed, too. So our process for creating these sites wasn't working, wasn't nearly as profitable as it wasn't beginning in the beginning. We spent some 50 to a hundred bucks and, you know, make a site worth two thousand dollars. And by the end it was like it was like fifty two hundred bucks to make a site worth like one hundred and fifty two hundred bucks. So we're like, well, that's not really great. So we had built this audience of people that want to buy sites from us, all earners. And now, now we didn't have supply, so we had demand. We had all these people wanting to buy sites, but no supply. And so we reached out to our audience that we'd built. We'd start a podcast and a blog talking about it. And we reached out to our audience, said, look, you guys are building sites to do you want to sell sites through us to our audience? Like, we'll check them, we'll vet them, and then we'll list them up for sale.

[00:10:51] And we'll take a commission on the sites that you're listing with us for sale. And that's that's kind of how we move from building our own sites for sale and selling them to, like, actually brokering other people's sites.

[00:11:02] So. So how long ago did you start the podcast?

[00:11:05] Yeah. So this was we started the brokering right around maybe 2011, 2012. And I think we started the podcast. We started the blog around 2010, 2011, and then maybe the podcast around 2012 as well.

[00:11:22] You were an early adopter in this field pretty early.

[00:11:25] I mean, we're not like early, but, you know, the reason we did it, man, was it's funny. We we have some friends. They have the tropical NBA podcasts and they run a community called the Dynamite Circle. We we went to meet them in the Philippines. You know, we were we were lonely for other entrepreneurial kind of connections. You know, we were in the Philippines. We were kind of on our own. We're on an island like literally in Mindanao. And, you know, we were like, look, we want to meet other entrepreneurs. And so we met these guys and they said, hey, come meet us on this. I think it was Mindoro. So we flew up to meet them and we started telling them our story. And these guys had a podcast that we'd started listening to and they were like, look, you guys are great. Let's do a podcast interview with you. We're like, we think we would suck. You guys sound great, but we suck at this. And and I went back. I was nervous. So was my my business partner was nervous about doing a podcast together. And we went back and listen to podcasts we liked and we listened to the first couple of episodes. And that made us a lot less nervous because people suck when they start. We're like no one's no one's great podcasts are out of the gate. So, like, it may be a lot more confident and feel a lot better about starting it, listening to their early foibles, so to speak.

[00:12:37] And I had the advantage of having gone to broadcasting school and been on the radio. So I got to. Got you beat on the basketball.

[00:12:45] Yeah, I can't do that either. You can make it work too.

[00:12:48] Yeah, well it's still a little rusty. When I started back just in year another, it's kind of like myself living in Vietnam. Stone's throw from where I am in Thailand. How do you like it there and what do you like about it?

[00:13:03] I love it. You know, in 2010 is when we have to move to the Philippines. I traveled a bit before that, but since then it's been just a whirlwind tour. I mean, for a number of years, my girlfriend now wife, you know, for four or five years we did nothing but travel. So we lived out of suitcases and we would stay in hotels or Airbnb is our service apartments. We'd say two months here and six weeks there and two weeks here, like just just doing travel. So we got we got a chance to you know, we spent a lot of time in Thailand, obviously all over Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines. We've been Italy, Prague spent quite a bit of time in Spain. So in the US, we traveled quite a bit. And we were we're always like looking for a place that places that we like. And then we just we found ourselves always going back to Vietnam. So we travel around for three months and then come back to Vietnam for a month or two. And then we travel for a couple of months and come back and we start spending more and more time here. And last year, actually, we said, you know what, let's just get a place like we're spending probably four or five months a year in Vietnam. Why don't we just spend seven, eight, maybe eight or nine months a year? We love it in Saigon, in Ho Chi Minh City. Let's just get a place we can buy stuff and like have a home base that wants to travel maybe a little less, but we'll have a home base. And we did that. It was. Yeah, twenty nineteen summer, twenty eighteen. We still do the travel thing and then you know, with everything that happened in early twenty twenty with covid and everything since we've been pretty locked out of Vietnam, as Dorothy said, there's no place like home.

[00:14:40] Yeah. Oh boy. Is that ever that for true. What's hot now in mainstream brokering. What are you selling. A lot of.

[00:14:50] We're selling quite a bit of Amazon. Businesses or fulfillment by Amazon. These are e-commerce businesses where, you know, people are uploading their products to Amazon, they're having Amazon handle the products and delivery and everything. So these are businesses that are quite popular and we're selling a lot of like maybe low six to low seven figure businesses in that movie. So that's been a that's a hot space right now.

[00:15:23] Ok, anything else?

[00:15:26] I mean, content sites are still good. So, you know, content sites that are either ad sense monetize or Amazon associate, which is an affiliate deal with Amazon, those still sell well, a lead generation sites. These are generally like not always, but but some of the ones that we sell are the ones that are for educational institutions. So let's say it's around like nursing or something around that sort of like technical vocational school. And there's profit schools that teach that. Well, they're always looking for students and those students pay a lot of money. So if you can deliver them leads, they're willing to pay you 40, 60, 80 bucks per lead until you can go through a company like Campus Explorer. And they're kind of the middleman and they set the relationships with the schools and then you just deliver them the leads. So, you know, they they you get the the the lead information that goes over to campus explorer, they may be paid like one hundred and twenty bucks or 50 bucks per lead and they're paying you 70, 80 bucks.

[00:16:29] There you go. Yeah. Back in the day, even before I got into radio, I was back in the dark ages, actually worked at the University of Phenix. So in in the Bay Area. So I do know about I do know about for profit education there, the business schools that schools make a lot of money.

[00:16:48] And so they're willing to play it, pay a lot of money for leads for the students.

[00:16:51] Boy, are they. What do you like most about doing Web site brokering?

[00:16:58] I mean, it's interesting.

[00:16:59] So let me let me say that sometimes the customers I like the most aren't necessarily the customers that make a lot of money. And let me explain why I say that. So, you know, we have some customers that are selling a business to them that, you know, they've put blood, sweat and tears into it and they're selling it for like, let's say, four hundred thousand dollars. And that's like literally life changing money for them. Yeah, we had a guy that was Cambodian kid in his early 20s, sold a site through us for a little over three hundred thousand dollars. And it was a crazy amount of money for a 20 something Cambodian kid.

[00:17:40] And he's now that he's now the fifth richest man in Cambodia. Wow.

[00:17:44] I think they've stolen a lot of money in that country that some people rolled around. I know, but but yeah, I know this guy. I mean, like, it was crazy.

[00:17:52] Like, he he's built like an entourage around him, other people that want to build these types of businesses. But it was like life changing money for him. And so, you know, like being able to do things like that is more interesting, being able to help people. Like we had a couple that sold the website for I think it was like mid to high five figures. And they want to do because they needed the money to pay for adoption services so they can adopt kids they really wanted to adopt. So, you know, like those are the kind of stories that I think are just really fascinating, that life changing stuff. But to be honest, like now, a lot of our money, the way we make our money is is through like the private equity, the like the the small private equity shops, the kind of the funds that are raising money to buy like a portfolio of businesses. And they're buying like high six to low seven figure businesses. And, you know, it's much more I mean, they've got interesting stories, don't get me wrong, but it's less personal. Right. So, yeah, I kind of like the personal stories of of the things that we're able to help people achieve in terms of selling their business or buying a business for the first time. Like, you know, there's this happens a lot is that people hear about kind of the remote location dependent lifestyle. There are some like mid-level manager exec, you know, sitting in some office, you know, maybe a cubicle or maybe even a corner office somewhere in the US and go, oh, man, I want to go to Bali. I want to go to Pokot and work on my site a few hours a day and make an income, make a living. And, you know, offering them the opportunity to do that is pretty cool.

[00:19:24] It's very rewarding. I agree with you. And it's not always the one that makes you the most money. That's going to be the most rewarding, you know, helping people.

[00:19:35] That's that's what's rewarding. What do you like least about what you do?

[00:19:41] I like least I mean, a lot of the things that I didn't like some of the day to day stuff I don't do anymore. The uncertainty is still it's nerve wracking. I've noticed like for me, I actually do. I work well when things are on the line, when there's more uncertainty or there's more risk, I do better. But it's a it's an awful feeling. Oh, yeah. So with everything going on with covid has been tough. I mean, I've, I think I've got a lot more done. But it's also a it also makes me pretty nervous because I don't know how things are going to turn out. I'll tell you, for example, like March was a really difficult month for us. Like we for our goal for Q1 is January, February, March. Twenty twenty. We were around 60 something percent of our goal, so forty almost 40 percent off of what we want to do. And that's not normal for us. Normally we're somewhere between like ninety and one hundred and ten percent. Sure, though, you know, it was it was bad. And then we had a pretty bad April, like April's not a solid month. And so that had us pretty nervous. We were like, OK, what how is this going to affect us? And we we had to sit down our team and tell them, look, kind of this is the boat we're in. We're in this boat together. We do our best to get us all through it. We're going to let you know if we're not able to. And you're going to have as much heads up as we can give you. But we're going to try to make this work. And here's our plan. And and luckily, we turned around. We had, I think, our best month ever in May. So that was that was pretty helpful underneath.

[00:21:13] It sounds like you needed to.

[00:21:15] We needed to. It was really, really helpful. And then June looking really solid, too. So I think we can have a really solid Q2 that doesn't, in my mind, like we're still going to hunker down and kind of see how things shake out in Q3. But it's it's a it's quite a relief to know that Q2 is shaping up much, much better.

[00:21:33] Absolutely. How big is your team?

[00:21:36] Just under seventy people. So, yeah. So we have like I think sixty seven, sixty eight people on our team right now. Really. Yeah. We have around just under twenty people are in the Philippines and everyone else is pretty much distributed.

[00:21:52] So we have some in the US, we have some in South America, we have some in Europe. We have a contingency in Asia, my business partner, Joe, is in Manila, his home base there, and I'm in Vietnam, but we got guys in Prague, Mexico City magazine everywhere.

[00:22:08] Are you doing some other services besides the website Procrit?

[00:22:12] Just brokering. But we have a team at each you know, we operate a little differently where it's not just an agency where we bring in brokers and then they kind of like own their relationship and kind of see everything through on their own. So we've made more of a machine or a process out of it. So, you know, when someone comes on board with us, we have a whole vetting team. So we have a department that's the vetting department. And their whole goal is to look at incoming businesses for sale and then go through our whole checklist and our whole thing, our whole process for asking if those businesses are are high of quality or don't have the issues that they they can't have to list with us. So after that, it goes from the vetting team over to the sales team and the sales team as a whole process and how they work with them. So end to end from your start of the relationship to the end of the relationship, you're working through, you know, an entire different team as you kind of work your way through the process.

[00:23:11] Well, now I'm a lot more impressed with my actions since I'm the team. I'm not I'm the man. So I know you don't broker a deal properties, which I'm quite happy about. Since you said any business, is there any other kind of website you don't handle?

[00:23:29] Yeah, we won't do anything on any of the legal businesses, I'm sure. Obviously either. Yeah, of course. Of course. We for a while we didn't do like marijuana businesses do now. So we think that it's it's funny because like there's no like we don't like I don't care, I don't care about adult, I don't care about marijuana or whatever.

[00:23:52] It's fine. Right. But our thought was like we're going to be super cautious in the business for a number of reasons. I mean, one, like we have customers that are looking at businesses and they are like, oh, I don't want to see this or, you know, that. So that makes sense. But then for other reasons, there's all these other businesses we won't list if we think they're well, if we just think they won't sell.

[00:24:20] So so like obviously, like if a business is scamming or sketchy, there are a whole number of things that we find out or we can't verify. That's more often is it's not that they're scamming or a scam necessarily, but like we can't verify that they're not. And so we don't let those businesses less. But then others. There's nothing wrong with the business, we're saying. But it's like in a niche that we're just we think is very short lived. So there is a time where, you know, those were those little hoverboard things. Oh, yeah. So we were selling some of the hoverboard sites and we realized, like, there was no one really buying them. Like there's not really they're not that hot. And so we end up shutting them down and not not allowing them.

[00:25:01] So there's there's a type of FBA I'm sorry, there's a type of drop shipping where people will just order the product on Alibaba, on all the express that shipped to their customer, just straight off all the express in the shipping time is the lag is really long and they don't use, like, unique images. And, you know, it's not like an illegal thing to do or it's not even like unethical or anything. It's just those businesses don't sell well, so we typically don't let them.

[00:25:28] Got it. Got it. You get a good look at a lot of e-commerce sites, sites. You mentioned the you mentioned the Amazon stuff. Are you seeing any other trends that are developing trends in e-commerce in particular?

[00:25:47] Well, I mean, it's just in insights that you would that you would broker. Yeah.

[00:25:53] So I'd say like in terms of what buyers are looking for, you know, there are a lot of sellers come to us and they say, look, you know, what kind of multiple will I get for the sale of my business?

[00:26:04] And the answer is always the boring. It depends right and right. And, you know, they're like, am I going to get twenty times my net monthly profit or am I going to get, you know, forty five times my net monthly profit? And it depends. Kind of sucks because if you're making ten thousand dollars a month, that could be devastating to a thousand four hundred fifty thousand. And so those are always like, well, how do I get the four hundred and fifty and not the two hundred and the kind of like their specifics. But the general way to think about this is it comes down to bias, perception of risk. Right. So, you know, if the business has been around longer, that's a positive sign. So if it's been around longer, it's got more history. That's generally a positive sign. Yes. If the business has diversified traffic so you don't have one traffic channel or one way of getting customers and you've got three or four or five, they're looking.

[00:26:55] You'd like one if they have.

[00:26:57] One affiliate, yes, one affiliate, skeptical, skeptical, the more affiliates you have, the more stable no, no one affiliate does more than 10 percent of your sales or whatever like that.

[00:27:08] That's an even stronger sign that your business is more stable. And it doesn't mean that your business isn't sellable. If you have, like one affiliate that's kind of crushing the others, system is not sellable, just means you're likely to take a slight ding on your multiple because of that, similar to like if you have only one product. So if you're in a business and you have one single product that's that's selling really well, that's kind of like making your entire business, your business still might be sellable. But as a buyer, I'm going to want to pay a discount for that because there's lots of risk with just one product to me so other people can come in, they could find a supplier that that product could run out of fashion. Like, you know, if you have 10, 12 products, they're selling well. OK, that's a little more diversified. I'm willing to pay a bit more. So those are the kind of like the things that affect the multiple is is the buyer's perception of risk in buying the business. How long? How long they'll make me money.

[00:28:05] Something is only worth what somebody will pay for it, right? Yeah.

[00:28:08] Yeah, exactly.

[00:28:10] So like I mentioned at the top of the interview, you're another expat. What do you miss about the USA?

[00:28:18] What I miss about the USA, I want to ask you definitely some food things, right, is like in and out and as delicious to be nice out in our burger right now, but like things like that for sure. But but to get a little more, I don't know, a little more.

[00:28:36] Specifically, more honest, you know, there are things that are challenging in Asia just in terms of communication. So, for example, I was telling you, my wife and I got a puppy, right. So we have this Pomeranian dog that you were playing with great fun. But like, there's some miscommunication that she used to have. So we can go to the groomer. She could take you to the groomer and try to like, explain in like English that's tough. And that groomer's English stuff, you know, what kind of cut she wants to give the dog and then they could end up get the dog off.

[00:29:10] Right. Completely shaving off. All the dog ends up getting a mohawk. Yeah, for sure. And like, you know, that's the kind of thing that, like, you just kind of have to roll your eyes, throw up your hands, just kind of go, oh, this is life. This is what we call it. You know, we call it here in Thailand. Titti. Yeah. Just and yeah. You know that one. Yeah. This is Africa. This is Asia. Like we you have to get used to.

[00:29:35] And it's funny, you know, as an expat, my business partner and I moved to the Philippines and we traveled through Asia. But it's different coming to visit for two weeks versus like living there. And and my business partner would get a little both of us, we get frustrated with that. But he continued to get frustrated when things weren't exactly right. Or he would order like and this is silly, but our coffee was like, you want warm milk? And they would never be able to get, like, warm milk. And he was like, you just get frustrated and like, God, it can never do anything right. I never and, you know, eventually you just you learn to just kind of like live with that.

[00:30:09] And after a man. After my own heart. Yeah.

[00:30:13] You just you have to if you don't learn to live with that and learn how to deal with those kind of annoyances, you'll just make yourself crazy.

[00:30:22] Indeed. Yes. And I have at times. So obviously things in America have gotten rather nuts.

[00:30:31] How often do you praise yourself for the decision you made to come out here? And I do every single day.

[00:30:39] Yeah. Know, I mean, I'm so happy that I had the opportunity and took it right. I mean, there's a lot of people that could have could have made it happen but didn't. I mean, there are other times in my life where I didn't drive, but and now what? I'm so glad that I did. And it's what I when I originally left, it wasn't like a total mindset. It was just one thing. I was like basically I'm just moving my home and where I live from the U.S. to the Philippines. But everything stays the same. Like we had an office, physical office that we went into. You know, we just we kind of kept everything the same. We lived in one place and we would take a vacation from there, but come back to our home. And then it was another mindshift later that, like, made me realize, like, we don't have to have a physical office, you know, we don't have to go to the office every day. You can work from home. You can travel and work at the same time. You're going to have your whole team do this through technology. And so, like all these things, add it up. And and I wouldn't have even realized any of that. I think if I would have stayed in the US, I would have missed out on this whole, like, lifestyle. It's you know, I say I do it. No, you've done it. But like, there are other people doing it. There are thousands of people that are kind of expat entrepreneurs that are running legitimate businesses and doing it remotely.

[00:31:53] And I'm not talking about those like digital backpackers. I'm not talking about the the kind of like people hanging out in the and the hostels or whatever. Like that's a thing. And people do that. That's great. But no, I mean, there's there's real entrepreneurs that are doing this kind of like travel abroad thing. That's vastly.

[00:32:09] Well, if Trump gets reelected, God forbid there will be a lot more that point, actually.

[00:32:15] I've had a lot of people that I've known seems like a lifetime ago when I was in the Navy a long time ago and I had some of those, you'll reach out.

[00:32:22] I've had people from high school reach out recently, like in the last year or two and say, hey, Justin, I see that you're kind of like living abroad and you've been doing a long time. Can I ask some questions or are you so happy you got out? And there seems to be more interest in that from the US? I never and all the years I've been over here, that wasn't a super common thing on some people go, oh, that's cool. What you're doing seems kind of interesting or neat, but in the last year or two, it's a lot more like like legitimate interest and possibly getting out that I'd never I'd never seen before.

[00:32:57] Oh, yeah. Now, if you could give some advice to someone selling a mainstream site, these sites to go to your site and listed, what would that advice be?

[00:33:09] Yes. With us now, I mean, non self serving stuff. I mean, prepare to smile a year before.

[00:33:17] So, I mean, sometimes you don't have the opportunity. So sometimes, like, you know, you're going through divorce and you need to sell the business to paper or whatever, and they just don't have the time then, you know, the time and all the time. But if you think that you may have some interest in selling the business at some point in the future, then, you know, have a talk with a broker. Right. Have a conversation. Start looking at getting your financials ready and a broker will kind of guide you on the things you need to do to prepare for that. But getting your financials in order is helpful, particularly once you get like some margin six to 12 months out from selling. You're going to want to start doing things like making sure your books are in order, making sure the business is able to be turned over, making sure you get rid of any spend that you have associated with the business that isn't actually helping. So a lot of time on the marketing side of our business and on the markets as we're doing a lot of exploratory things, like I'm throwing dollars at something and I don't know if it's gonna work, but as a test, right. I like get rid of that test, you know, 12 months out, definitely six months off from the sale of your business. And the reason is, you know, we're going to count. You're going to have a lot of those expenses count against you on the profit loss. And so, you know, it makes sense for you to start to cut back on any of the things that aren't actually making you a profit, that are actually making you money.

[00:34:35] Absolutely. And don't change anything. After we get into this, I'll tell you a little story.

[00:34:43] I'll tell you this, Bruce. We have people that list with us. They actually submit their to be listed and then they say we get them listed on our site and we're going through the process of finding a buyer and and screening buyers and buyers, particularly for the larger businesses they want. They want a detailed review. They're going to dig into it. And you have your sellers that feel like they're already sold the business. And so they're kind of like letting it get neglected or they're ordering more back.

[00:35:07] You read you read my mind. Oh, man, no. Did you we beat these guys up about it.

[00:35:12] We're telling the sellers, no, no, you can't do that. And I understand the thought process. You're kind of like, I'm done with this. Anyway, let me move on. But no, until you get money in your hand wired to your account, you need to continue working on the business until you get the money. Don't drop the ball because you got to this all the way through.

[00:35:32] Man Yeah, exactly.

[00:35:36] And we want to say we're on the same page there. Well, we did. We most certainly are. Well, hey, Justin, I'd really like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk, and I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon.

[00:35:48] Thanks, Bruce. Appreciate it, man. Now, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

[00:35:53] My broker tip today is part five of how to buy an adult website. Last week we talked about how to determine the value of a website, how to negotiate the sale and how to get to the point of drawing up an agreement. So now you're talking to your attorney and you're having them draft an agreement. What should be in it? Well, your attorney will guide you through the legal side, but here are some considerations to keep in mind from a buying standpoint. What is the date you'd like to close now?

[00:36:22] Make sure you know that you'll have the money to either pay the deposit or the entire amount of the purchase by that date. I've had buyers who aren't ready and that just causes issues. In fact, I'm going through some of that right now with a couple of my deals. Make sure that all of the assets you're purchasing are in that agreement, such as every domain included in the sale processing and payment accounts, relationships with vendors, all records including two to five, seven data software to run the sites and any other assets, such as source code for the sites. Of course, it should spell out any payment schedule if there is one who's responsible for closing costs, such as paying for escrow. And there are always terms that are unique to yours and the seller situation. This assumes you're the party responsible for drawing up the agreement. If the seller is drawing it up, then it's important that you express all of this to your legal representatives so they can check the seller's agreement and see if any changes are necessary. We'll talk about the subject more next week. And next week, we'll be talking to notable porn actor Lance Hart.

[00:37:34] And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest. Justin could talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.