Today I’ve got two invincible kings on the show – Wilson who is the founder of Mindbay, a specialized Amazon brokerage firm who has handled over 50 transactions in the last 3 years. Wilson has been an online entrepreneur for over 20 years and has operated an Amazon shop himself.

Hameed Hemmat, also a partner in Mindbay, has a background in App development specifically with iOS apps. He sold his app business recently that he was running for 5 years. He also operates a successful eComm store in the indoor grow space.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to sell your Amazon FBA Business


• How Mindbay sells Amazon and App businesses


• When to sell your Amazon FBA Business


• Why to sell your Amazon business


• Best practices for selling your Amazon Business


• Getting acquired


• What you need to do before getting acquired


• A very detailed step by step process that is involved

And much more!

Mindbay Exclusive – Free quote on your Amazon FBA Business

http://amzsecrets.com/82

DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, guys!

HAMEED HEMMAT: Thank you for having us!

WILSON: Thank you! Nice to meet you, Dave!

DAVID ALADDIN: By the way, this is the first episode where we’ve had two guests on the show at the same time. Can you guys take us to the beginning before Mind Bay? Where did your journey begin?

WILSON: Hameed, I’ll let you start there.

HAMEED: Yeah, let’s see… Well, I started in the app business… I am going to get to how me and Wilson met… But I started in the app business about five years ago. This was during I guess you can call the gold rush of the risk-in era where anyone who’s somewhat familiar with app development started in 2011/2012. Me and a friend of mine, we partnered up, we built about seven portfolios, meaning seven developer portfolios with over 400apps. Just recently… The way I met Wilson actually was through a brokerage because I was looking to sell my business over the past year. And Wilson ended up buying my business, so…which ended working out great, and then we became really good friends. And then we saw, you know, I guess you can say a gap in the marketplace with brokerages. And no disrespect to the brokerages, I worked with these guys, they are great. But we just saw that we could offer a better service and help other business being able exit their businesses. So, we decided to partner up, plus we became good friends and that’s kind of how we got to where we are at today.

DAVID ALADDIN: What about you, Wilson?

WILSON: Okay, so yeah, my background…well, my educational background is in engineering, so I have a system based background. But my career really started to focus on entrepreneurship and so I’ve been involved in probably over fifty different businesses at different level ranging from the CEO of one billion dollar plus firm to a total startup. So, I’ve done a lot of different things. Really my strengths are really systems based implementation, so, picking a business and scaling it, specifically in the sectors of ecommerce, Software and also marketplaces. So this is kind of where I’ve dedicated my focus. Mind-Bay was founded because I realized at one point that in order to sort of find business opportunities. Building it was why I started it, but it was hard to do because I guess setup of any business takes time. So, I just decided that the best way to approach being a serial entrepreneur is to acquire the business. And what I did was I created Mind-Bay primarily as an acquisition for acquisition. Through that process of working with sellers like Hameed I built relationship with them, because a lot of them are very talented. You know, people who are willing to build a business from scratch usually have a certain, you know, profile which includes, you know, highly motivated personality, also willing to take risk, a lot of different skills. So, I tried to work with those people if they are right and really tried to build upon that. A lot of the people I work with are also entrepreneurs and a lot of them happen to be in ecommerce such as Amazon and eBay, and they always ask me to go and sell their business. So, that’s how the sell side part of our business kind of formed, but most of it was really based upon the bayside. So, that’s kind of the background and now here we are. I am still, you know, focused on being, you know, very entrepreneurial. We also operate. But the brokerage now has really come to intuition because I found Hameed. You know, it was very difficult to find a partner who not only had sales background and the ability to track and work with people, but also the experience to actually doing an Amazon business, and other businesses as well. So, I think that’s a very important aspect of being a successful broker.

DAVID ALADDIN: And Hameed, you said you had four hundred apps before you got acquired. How did that happen within five years?

HAMEED HEMMAT: Oh, man, you know, there’s actually…I have colleagues in the app space who did way more that. So, there really wasn’t a lot in…putting it in perspective, but… No, it was just…In that space it was just…we just had a system of just pumping out apps. So, basically what we would do is we would buy source codes from certain communities and then we would, you know, had a whole team, I built a team of artists and developers overseas leveraging up work which I’m sure most Amazon sellers do that as well. And basically, man, it was almost like a factory. We were just pumping out apps every single week. We were just risking source codes, many casino games, and kids’ games, arcade games. We were just risking with different themes, modify the games, and just literally be pumping out three to five, six, seven up to ten apps a week.

DAVID ALADDIN: Yeah, I mean, I actually have eight apps in my name. I’ve heard about that strategy, it was actually before the Amazon time. And like I was going to pump out…it was like a flashcard apps for every single type of, you know, test or quiz that people would have and sell it for 99cents. You know, it was very time-consuming. Not in a sense that it took a lot of time to create one app, but it’s like iTunes started catch on if you had too many apps. You know, it started moderating it more.

HAMEED HEMMAT: Right, yeah, no, definitely. You can’t just put one of the same apps and have four hundred of them or different versions of it. You got to have different apps, you know, what I mean? Do, we diversify casino, kid’s games, roulette, slots, all different types of games and we just pump them out to the app store. And did pretty well for quite some time, so… It was a lot of fun.

DAVID ALADDIN: Let get into the best topic, acquisition, which I think pretty much everybody wants to get their business acquired at some point or another. Let’s go through the process. Let’s say I want to sell my Amazon business. Where does it start?

WILSON: Okay! So, yeah, that’s one I can answer. So, first of all in term of where it starts it has to be…you have to have a reason, a rational reason. And we find that most of the sellers that we work with, they either sell for one of two reasons: personal reasons or business reasons. Personal reasons really include force down pool, changing priorities, you know, people who are looking to, you know, maybe diversify some of their income, maybe their time doesn’t allow them to dedicate as much, sometimes maybe unfortunate circumstances like a divorce, or maybe a partnership split, or a retirement. And that causes them to want to sell their business.

So, those are all very legitimate reasons for a sale. Most of our sellers sell because of business reasons. And those business reasons, if they are, for example, they may include being such as a changing competitive environment. A lot of times when, let’s say for example on Amazon, could be a flood sellers coming to that, you know, specific risk that includes change the risk profile for the seller or for the owner. And the owner may want to ship the risk to somebody else willing to take on that type of risk entering a new market. So, that’s a legitimate reason. Diversifying as well, I think, diversification. So, to channel that diversification is really important. A lot of times people who would want to sell because let’s say for example they need… When I find Amazon sellers, some of them…many of them are single channel Amazon sellers, but lot of them are multichannel sellers, they need to run a website and they may need to sell on other marketplaces.

One thing is that diversifying the channel is also a good portfolio management strategy. Another thing is to having really too many, you know, having too many eggs in one basket. You know, it happens with everything. Just even in the app business we talked about having too many app in the same genre like casinos creates a risk. It’s the same with Amazon. You have too many, you know, listings, you know, too much activity in a certain business sector that may be, you know, something that Amazon is growing in, or maybe have a lot of copycats who are trying to come in. That’s something that allows you to set for diversify. But the main thing that I find is that people are around when they recapitalize their business. They want to take some money off the table and they want to put it into other things. And I find that a lot of sellers want to do that. For e