Have you fallen into the trap of thinking that you have to work hard at running your business to get wealthy? I can tell you that this is not necessarily the case. It’s still hard work, but your hard work should be invested elsewhere so that you can see genuinely spectacular results in short periods of time.
At the Harbour Club, I share with my delegates practical tips and advice from my personal experience using relevant examples, which have been implemented and proven for more than twenty years.
Look at Richard Branson: at the early stage of his career, he executed a huge deal that was his game-changer. He made his money when he sold Virgin Music to Thorn EMI for roughly $960 million. Before that day, he admits he was borderline insolvent. Another example is Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp. Brian made his money when he and co-founder, Jan Koum, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion.
Both of these well-known entrepreneurs only became wealthy when they sold their own business or acquired and sold another business. Businessmen and women who have secured real wealth are usually less operationally involved in their businesses, leaving them more time to think strategically about the bigger picture.
Who We Are
By analyzing the steps I have taken to close deals and acquire businesses over the years, I created a framework of processes and systems that I felt confident in teaching. I did my first-ever Harbour Club course in 2009—an intensive three-day, two-night seminar.
The Harbour Club has conducted a few courses every year since and has completed hundreds of deals. (And with the pandemic, we’ve gone virtual!) I refined the teaching methods and evolved it step-by-step over the years. The goal has always been to make each Harbour Club seminar a little better than the last one. The people who attend leave rave reviews and more people come to the next course, which is very gratifying.
In the Harbour Club course, we go through numerous different deal structures (currently 12 structures), showing how you can buy businesses without using cash up front. These are designed to cope with everything from the well-established, profitable, debt-free business right down to the utterly distressed basket case that’s about to close its doors and send everybody home. We cover the whole spectrum of motivated opportunities.
The deal pie sits somewhere in the middle. It’s a way of structuring a deal so that you can acquire a decent business.
I am incredibly passionate about empowering entrepreneurs and helping to democratize wealth in a meritocratic way. I hope you will join me in that quest. Remember, you can’t help the poor by being one of them. When you are truly free, you can help others to join you on the same path.
Why You Should Join the Harbour Club
I talk about a lot of my methods in my book, Go Do Deals, but I have saved the best ideas for the Harbour Club itself, to be fair to the people who choose to invest in their own development. However, here is a sample of some of the extra tactics and strategies taught in the course:
- The deal team is just a big interference: Learn why it is completely wrong thinking to surround yourself with advisers to do a deal. It can seem like a crutch to support a lack of confidence, but it ruins deals and means you have expenses, whether you transact or not. Smart dealmakers know how to make deals, self-finance, and when to use external advisers.
- Personal guarantee magic: Find out how to make “personal guarantees” disappear using this financial engineering strategy (it works on most SME businesses).
- Qualifying leads: Discover why $500,000–$5 million revenue companies are in the sweet spot for doing deals.
- Three research tools: How to find an endless supply of leads and how to pick the right industry.
- Eleven psychological triggers of a motivated seller: Understanding these triggers is the key to unlocking the creative deal structures that give sellers what they want while structuring a deal for no money up front without borrowing or debt. Once you understand these triggers, then creating a win-win deal will be effortless.
- The perfect storm: When three of these triggers are combined, you are much more likely to close the deal.
- “I hate due diligence”: It’s expensive, boring, and time-consuming, but necessary, right? What if you could get your due diligence done for free without any extra work, and even better, have it more complete than if you did it yourself or paid $100,000 to hire professionals to do the job for you? Find out how on Day Two of the course.
- Insolvency secrets: Discover how to buy companies through the insolvency process using these five proven deal templates (100% legal).
- Easy cash injection: Discover how to take a company with ten or more employees and inject up to 15% of their yearly revenue back into the business as cash. It only takes one phone call to do and requires no upfront cash.
- Bulletproof purchase agreement: How to turn the simple, age-old purchase agreement into a contract more powerful than anything a lawyer could ever draft (no legal experience required). This is out-of-the-box thinking, but it’s so powerful that a bankruptcy attorney working for one of the largest accountancy firms in the UK now recommends this strategy to all his clients.
- Compete clause: How to stop the previous business owners from stealing your best staff and customers and going into direct competition with you. Non-competes are no longer viable in some places; they are a violation of human rights under EU law. Discover one simple strategy and get your hands on a proven contract template you can use that will leave you secretly wishing they do steal your customers.
For more information on selling your business, order a copy of my book, Go Do Deals, here. - Financial engineering: Find out about amazing tactics to uncover profit hidden in your business without increasing sales. If your business’ gross annual revenue is $500,000 or more, then this alone could recoup your course fee within a couple of weeks of returning home.
- Cash is king: Discover the three-step formula for fixing the long-term cash-flow problems in almost any type of business. You don’t go broke from a lack of sales, profit, or gross annual revenue: it’s a lack of cash that will bury you alive.
These are just a few examples of what you can expect to learn from our courses. Once you are in the Harbour Club, there are many ways to get support from the club community. Some of these include my WhatsApp phone number to ask me questions about your deals directly and access to the Harbour Club App. In the app, you can join groups and get feedback from other Harbour Club Community members.
In the Harbour Club group, people usually share their questions with the other members, ”Hey, what would you do?” “What do you think about this?” “Do you think I should do it this way or that way?” Sometimes they ask me about the opportunity, and I’ll agree or point out a different way to do it. This thinking time is incredibly valuable. Having a group of peers you can talk to, and who have gone through deals that might be similar, will help you formulate the best plan for you and the business.
What Are You Waiting For?
I hope you feel inspired to climb onto the next rung of the entrepreneurial ladder, to “go do deals,” and that I may have challenged some conventional wisdom about how it is really done.
Trust me, it isn’t easy—nothing worth having is—but I believe it is a better, more efficient, and more exciting way to use your entrepreneurial skills. It’s an area of business worth learning about and understanding better for your own wealth and that of the world.
Eventually, you’ll see that there are deals everywhere if you know what to listen for. At the Harbour Club, you will learn this important skill of applying a filter to how you listen. Your next deal is likely to be on your mobile phone! To sign up for one of our courses, please visit the Harbour Club and get connected!
