Is Buying an Established Business better than a Startup Idea?

Growing a successful business takes years of strategic planning that has to face a number of failures before you are actually able to profit. This means you need to have an in-depth idea of the actual marketing conditions of the field in which you want to establish your business. On top of that, there are business tactics, marketing and sales techniques that you need to learn in order to successfully build a business.

This is the reason why only a handful of people are able to make a decent amount of money in today’s competitive market. Any successful business is a result of years of hard work and a massive investment of time and capital. The setbacks due to timely failures also takes their toll,  resulting in the need for business strategies to be updated on a fairly regular basis. Thus, it becomes clear that looking for already established businesses that could be bought could save you a lot of trouble.

This article goes into detail about how buying such a business could turn out to be more fruitful than building your own startup. However, this doesn’t mean in any way that you should drop your startup idea that you’ve been working on in order to buy a business. That being said, we’ll look into the pros of buying an existing business from the perspective of a person who does not want to start things from scratch.

• Buying an existing business comes with a less financing risk:

Financing is a major issue whenever you want to follow through with a startup plan, as investors are always looking for secure investment options. Buying an existing business means that you won’t have to look for lenders who may be uncertain while supporting you financially. This is because of the fact that any startup idea has yet to prove that it can actually make money. On the other hand, buying an existing business lets you be assured about the income it will generate.

• Startups make you wait until your earnings could start:

Another reason why people tend to buy existing businesses is that money starts getting generated without any wait. With a startup plan, it’s highly unlikely that you’d be able to earn any money from day one.

If you don’t want to wait a significant amount of time before being able to generate money, buying an existing business might be the best thing for you. Apart from this, a startups requires you to come up with a strategic plan from scratch that is amenable to frequent and correct modifications.

• It’s easier to find a recognizable brand to buy:

Establishing brand value is yet another tricky part of creating a startup plan, and it might take months if not years before your startup could reach a recognizable position. However, you could just look for a business for sale in your local area, and look into ones that have been in the market for a considerable amount of time. For example, if you are based in Houston, you can look at the Houston businesses for sale and see what businesses on the market have the highest brand value.

• You get their existing customers from the get-go:

The  customer base is one of the biggest things you acquire with an established business and this might even end up making all the difference. When you buy such a business, you get their existing customers without having to plan strategic marketing approaches to acquire initial customers. You can always compensate for lost customers by improving your marketing strategy along with doing your best in order to keep the existing ones.

• You get a set of trained employees:

A trained workforce takes a significant amount of time before reaching a decent level of productivity. When you are buying an established business, you get employees that are already used to the industry conditions and know the inner workings of the company. With a startup, you need to train everyone you hire in order to build a team of skilled employees. However, you could get this trained workforce at no additional cost if you’re able to buy the right kind of business.

You need to have a clear idea of the skills and training condition of the employees before you buy any business. This is important in order to ensure that your team can handle the business on its own when you are unable to dedicate a lot of time to it.

Conclusion: Buying an existing business comes with its own set of pros and cons and you need to balance these out before you make the final deal. If you are someone who finds it difficult to invest time, buying an existing business might open a whole new set of opportunities for you.

However, this article does not intend to demotivate anyone who is passionate about a startup. You should always be aware of the possibilities you have.