So today we're going to go over the 10 steps, 10 steps people, to buying your first business. James, welcome to the show. Let's ready to rock, man. Very happy to be here. And this setup is very cool today. I like it a lot. Yeah, this is going to be awesome, man. For people that are unfamiliar, let's do a quick five-second background, and then we'll just jump right into it. Sure. So I had a background

in accounting and finance. So I worked for one of the world's largest financial services

companies and I did that for 12 and a half years. And I eventually had the courage to leave at

the beginning of 2022 to do what I'd always wanted to do, which was buy small businesses.

I saw this wave. It's well

documented in the media, but retirees selling their businesses, this huge tsunami of businesses

coming up for sale. And I wanted to be a part of it. So I've been doing that a year and a half

so far. And I bought a retaining wall company, a roofing company, and a concrete paver business.

They're the three main operating businesses and a few extra, a kind of smaller holdings

as well in addition to that. So having a great time in order to do this, I've achieved

financial freedom in that I've replaced my salary that I was making previously, and I've

got all my time back. So now it it's great I'm having a great time and

it's fun doing things like this yeah it's super interesting because once you get one and you

understand the different parts about business then you can continue going on and on using the

same principles the same application like this is the skill set that people need to learn that once

they learn it they can use it for the rest of their lives just a varying different commas and zeros in the acquisition price, correct? Yeah, so my background was doing deals, but it wasn't deals for myself. So there was a learning, doing it for myself and holding some of that weight, but then this deal, it's the same process over and over again, and hopefully from this point on, the companies get larger and larger.

But yeah, it's the same process, like you said.

Cool, perfect. And as we're doing this, what I'm realizing is when it comes to real estate, when it comes to business buying, when you're buying businesses, you're buying cash flow. And a lot of people right now in the market, we're filming this in 2023. and in the market, it's very difficult to have cash flow through real estate,

especially if you're starting out because to have cash flow through real estate,

especially if you're starting out, because you need to buy the real estate first to build up

the equity, to start leveraging that to hopefully get cash flow down the line. So you're buying

business, you're buying literally years of cash flow. That's what you're buying. So today I'm

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