🤯 Multiple Madness
Hey there 👋,
In this week’s Alts by Flippa newsletter I discuss:
- Multiples and asking prices
- When buying a coffee shop is a trap
- The #999 club comes to Handshake domains
- Onfolio goes public
Every heading is a discussion channel in the Alts by Flippa discord community – come join over 1750 of us.
#acquisitions
Nate Ginsburg from Centurica emailed another interesting graph showing asking price by profit:
In aggregate, asking prices (and therefore multiples) for the first half of this year are the highest they have been since pre-covid. However, we know from his previous graph (covered here) that there were far fewer listings sold last quarter (Q2) and I expect the overall trend line to flatten (or potentially drop) in H2 of this year.
Here is the BoxPlot guide explaining the graph above (coming back to this):
If asking prices are no longer shooting up, how should we be pricing assets we are selling (or now in my case advising)? I asked this question on Twitter:
For me, I’d rather not have to set an asking price on a listing, as it can be either too high and put off potential acquisition-fit buyers, or too low where the seller does not get the maximum value. Also, I feel an asking price kind of shows your hand face up to buyers, i.e. what you are prepared to sell for.
As such, the asking price on Flippa listings for me is the starting price for offers, and I’m putting this at the top of listing descriptions:
Please note: the asking price is a starting price for negotiation. It is based on what I feel is a reasonable multiple, based on market insights and similar listing data. As an M&A advisor, I work to achieve multiple offers higher than this asking price. This is the opposite to brokerages who list a high asking price but accept a significantly reduced sales price.
I personally don’t like the practise of putting very high asking prices (and therefore multiples) with the intention of accepting a significantly lower sales price:
I’d rather the asking/starting price was fair, placing the listing within the 25th percentile (first quartile Q1) and the 75th percentile (third quartile Q3) of industry multiples, depending on how strong the asset is, e.g. diversification of traffic / revenue sources.
Then if the asset really is one of the very best, up at the 95th percentile or a true outlier, I would expect bids above the standard range, and advise the seller accordingly.
Back in June, I wrote about setting up a holding company to buy local businesses where I live in the UK.
I’m in the process of getting my HoldCo going, but I’m back focussed on online business again, and I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger on a cafe I was looking at. It’s been such a crazy time for local businesses with covid and now the energy crisis, that I no longer think you can use any historical expenditure in the P&L.
If I were to get fresh quotes today from utility companies, I’m not sure there would be any profit left to put a multiple on.
For example, I saw on Twitter that Callum from Reviews.io stated how the electricity bills of his family’s coffee shop has just jumped over 5x!
I think there’s going to be so many local businesses, in the UK at least, closing this winter. I expect local/traditional business brokers to be inundated with enquiries, but the sad fact of the matter is that even more than typical will be unsellable.
#domains
I’ve been getting bids on my Handshake 4 digit domain names at Namebase, and it’s being led by the 999 club we first saw on ENS (.eth) domains that has now appeared on HNS.
The top sale of 26K $HNS used to be a significant amount of money, and I hope it will be again, but currently it’s only ~$1500, compared to a 31ETH floor for 999 club ENS domains (almost $50K right now).
This Week’s Flippa Featured Domains
DayAtTheSpa.com – exact match keyword gets 40K/m search volume in US according to Ubersuggest
altsmarket.com – for the Amazon of Alts?
rev.xyz – to boost NFT revenue?
PCToMac.com – is the natural evolution
cold.beer – yes please
#contentsites
Onfolio, the holding company by Dom Wells which acquires and manages content sites and ecommerce businesses, recently closed a $13.7M initial public offering led by the investment bank EF Hutton.
Whilst there are a number of publicly traded media companies in our space (see Media Companies For Exits & Investing – a post on investing.io I wrote back in 2020), this is a first for someone who rose up out of our boostrapped community. Congrats to Dom and team.
That’s it for for this week, don’t forget to come join over 1750 of us in the Discord community where we discuss all these stories and more.
Richard Patey is in website investing and ecommerce stores with his M&A Advisory Patey Capital. He previously ran the Alts by Flippa Newsletter and Discord community, and has successfully exited four businesses.
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