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How To Buy a Business You Can’t Afford

  • Liz Wilcox

  • Owner: Smart Passive Income
  • $500,000 annual revenue

Liz Wilcox sells weekly email newsletter templates for $9 a month, with no upsell.

We featured her little membership a while back πŸ‘‡

In April she bought Smart Passive Income, the brand Pat Flynn spent 18 years building.

Pat turned down bigger offers before she came along…

Two other offers I got were for eight figures…

We’re not gonna get into specific numbers of the deal or anything like that here, but it wasn’t an eight-figure deal.

Those were venture capitalists who wanted the subscriber list.

Pat’s business partner Matt Gartland explains how Liz paid instead…

It means that buyer doesn’t arrive on closing day with a suitcase full of cash… There’s always something due at close. So we had a percent of sale, a smaller percent, but still a percent at sale.

Then quarterly payments, designed to be cash flowed by the business she just bought 🀯

She didn’t outbid anyone, she convinced the seller she was the right owner.

Sellers typically finance a third or more of the price over 5-7 years, and BizBuySell has over 1,500 owner-financed listings – mostly restaurants, shops and local service businesses.

Find a business in a niche you know, then ask the owner if they’d carry the rest πŸ‘

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Updated: November 11, 2026

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