Some prospective entrepreneurs choose to buy businesses instead of starting their own from scratch. This can be a great way to break into business ownership. However, it’s important to do your due diligence to ensure you make a smart business acquisition decision. This is especially important when buying a struggling business. The last thing you want is to buy a business that winds up bankrupt a few months down the road. 

Get Help from an Experienced Broker

Buying a business can be a complicated process, especially if you’ve never done it before. This is why it’s important to work with an experienced broker. Your business broker can help you with several important tasks, including defining your criteria for choosing a business, doing a due diligence inspection, and handling business negotiations. When you work with a broker, you can get help with just a few specific tasks or the entire business buying process. Regardless of your level of experience with buying a business, a broker will make your life a lot easier.

Structure Your New Business

After buying a business, what’s the next step? You’ll need to notify your state that the business has changed ownership. At this point, you may also want to choose a new structure for the business. For example, you may decide to form a new LLC or corporation, particularly if you purchased only the business’s assets. 

Use Process Mining to Identify New Opportunities

If you want to turn around a struggling business, you’ll need a good plan. But how do you identify opportunities to make impactful improvements? Process mining is your answer! With process mining, you can identify inefficient and outdated business processes and improve workflows, reduce costs, and boost sales. Process mining can also help you manage risk. To get started, learn how to prioritize process mining when acquiring a struggling business.

Make Small Changes

More often than not, making big changes to an existing business is a mistake. Avoid fixing things that aren’t broken. Pay attention to what customers like about the business and avoid alienating them by making major overhauls to your products, pricing, or marketing content. For example, changing a restaurant menu won’t help with sales if the business location is the main problem. By doing this, you’ll only drive off loyal customers who are willing to go out of the way for amazing food! 

Create a Solid Marketing Plan

A data-driven marketing strategy is essential to reviving a struggling business. TechnologyAdvice.com recommends starting by gathering data on current customers, including demographics, location information, and the steps they take as they progress through the sales funnel. Then, you can analyze trends and patterns to create highly targeted marketing campaigns for different audience groups.

Content marketing is a great place to start! Content marketing is a strategy that can be very beneficial for businesses of all sizes. Essentially, content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable content in order to attract and retain customers. This content can take many different forms, including blog posts, infographics, videos, and more. One of the main advantages of content marketing is that it can help to build trust with potential customers. By providing informative and useful content, businesses can establish themselves as experts in their field and develop a relationship of trust with their target audience. Turn to online resources like CornerstoneContent to learn more about optimizing your content marketing. 

If you want to buy a business but funds are tight, buying a struggling company could be a great way to break into entrepreneurship. Just be careful not to rush the process! Take the time to find the right business broker, use process mining to identify business opportunities, choose a suitable business structure, and establish an effective marketing plan that includes content marketing. All of this up-front work will pay off when that struggling business starts to grow!

Riddick & Co Entrepreneurial Finance specializes in offering innovative financial advisory solutions for entrepreneurs and growing businesses. Schedule a consultation. 

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Author – Joyce Wilson is a guest blog writer for Riddick & Co Entrepreneurial Finance and is not affiliated with the firm in any other capacity.

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