Intentional Growth Leveraging the Digital World to Grow Business Value
After selling his online publication with over 220,000 subscribers, Mark Daoust was approached by a friend also wanting to sell his business. This was the start of what would become Mark’s next adventure, Quiet Light Brokerage, has currently sold over $100M in online companies.
If you listen, you will learn:
- What it means to be an online company
- The different types of online businesses
- How online businesses are valued
- How to increase the transferable value of your company
- The power of analytics online
- How a traditional business can leverage the internet
Where It All Began
Mark Daoust didn’t start out in the online business brokerage world. He first worked for an internet company in Maryland and made it through an extreme downsizing where he was then tasked with taking care of hundreds of clients.
Through this experience, he learned a lot about working with online businesses and eventually started an online publication called Site Reference. Site Reference generated revenue through sponsorships of the newsletter as well as direct mailings to their list of contacts.
[clickToTweet tweet=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” quote=”“In the online world, if you have eyeballs..if you have an audience, you can make money.” ” theme=”style2″]
Mark was admittedly a little naïve and sold Site Reference for less than what the company should have been worth if he would have made slight changes. It is hard to put a price on a company where he was the sole contributor to the business and all he had was a list of followers. Admittedly, his business lacked transferability.
Making Your Business More Transferable & Valuable
Mark now owns Quiet Light Brokerage which is in the emerging niche of selling and buying websites. He helps his clients with what he lacked in his previous business – how to make a business more transferable.
In this podcast, Mark discusses four main things that will impact the value of a company.
- Risk
- Growth
- Transferability
- Documentation.
Check out Mark’s Ultimate Guide to Website Value here: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/resource/website-value
Marriage of Traditional and Online Business
Quiet Light Brokerage works with different types of online companies including eCommerce, service based businesses, software as a service companies, content sites, subscriptions sites, and lead generation sites.
Online companies are not just websites. Traditional brick and mortar businesses that have a company website are not online companies. According to Mark, traditional companies have the opportunity to grow their business in a way they haven’t before with leveraging the internet.
“No one wants to talk to a salesperson. People don’t want to be sold. They want to make up their mind on their own.”
The marriage of online and offline worlds is happening. Mark gives examples and elaborates on this point in the podcast. Business owners do not have to get rid of what they have developed offline but they will need to apply it to the online world to continue to be successful. There is only a ton of upside for their business.
Contact Information and Bio for Mark:
Email: mark@quietlightbrokerage.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdaoust/
Twitter: @markdaoust
Company Website: https://www.quietlightbrokerage.com/
Company Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/QuietLightBrokerage/
Main Office Phone: 800-746-5034
Mark is the founder and President of Quiet Light Brokerage. He started Quiet Light after selling an online publication that he built which boasted over 220,000 subscribers. Mark is an in demand conference speaker and a guest contributor to publications such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc., Huffington Post, among others.
In 2007, a year after having sold his first online business, a friend asked Mark if he would be willing to help him sell his web hosting company. During the previous year, Mark was evaluating whether or not to start a consultancy firm to assist owners of profitable websites who wanted to divest of their websites. With the call from this friend, Quiet Light was officially born. Mark retained his friend’s business, put the listing out to market, and within two months had found a buyer at a price that was higher than average web hosting companies were fetching in the marketplace.
Since that first business in 2007, Mark has personally helped dozens of small business owners and entrepreneurs and has also expanded Quiet Light to the team it has today. In building out a team of advisors to help other small business owners, Mark has always emphasized the importance of honesty, working in the client’s best interest (even if that means not working in his own best interest), and thorough preparation of all listings before they are brought to market.