Today’s trend of the week is “survival guide books”.

From climate change and financial uncertainty to global conflict and viral outbreaks, many people are feeling less certain about what comes next. That growing unease is quietly fueling the rise of survival guide books.

People are buying these books not just to learn practical skills, but to feel more prepared and in control. Because Googling ‘how to survive the apocalypse’ won’t work if the internet is down.

The audience is wider than you might think. Travelers, hikers, campers, and preppers are all looking for advice on everything from outdoor survival to handling unexpected emergencies.

These books are performing strongly on Amazon, with average revenue of $78,596.91 according to Exploding Topics. Interest is rising too, with searches for “survival guide book” up 110% over the past year.

Survival content is perfect for social media, whether you’re sharing quick tips, crisis scenarios, or gear recommendations. You can also create more compelling offers by bundling a survival guide book with an emergency or camping kit.

Today we have for you:

• ChatGPT hit $100M in ad revenue just weeks after launch
• Google expands Merchant Center loyalty features to 14 countries

And:

• Meta adds eBay to its affiliate program
• YouTube opens Shopping Affiliate program to small creators
• Shopify Tinker turns eCommerce ideas into prototypes in minutes

Alright, let’s dive in.

AI

Google

Affiliate

Read All About It!

This entrepreneur makes $15K/month from one gaming site: traffic strategy

Step-by-step guide to apply for a business loan: make an informed decision

U.S. users can now change their Gmail address: Google explains how

Occupations ranked by projected AI job loss risk: 9.3 million U.S. jobs at risk

YouTube

Shopify

Money Nomad

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Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10067 – Open to Offers

eCommerce | fashion & apparel

Trademarks for an equestrian-focused brand. The equestrian community is one of the most affluent and loyal customer bases in the world. Globally, logo and graphic brands have a large market share in the fashion industry. We trademarked a beloved coined phrase for the style-conscious equestrian. We complimented our graphic pieces to include trademarked, signature pieces that created a loyal following. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #231 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “foldable water bottles”.

It feels like everyone, especially Gen Z, is carrying a water bottle these days.

But let’s be honest, traditional bottles can be bulky and annoying to lug around, especially if you’re constantly on the move.

That’s why foldable water bottles are getting so much attention. They collapse to less than half their size when empty, so they’re easy to pack away after a flight, a gym session, or a hike. It’s a simple idea, but incredibly practical.

Social media is pouring fuel on the trend. Searches on TikTok are growing, averaging around 6.6K per month. On Google, “foldable water bottle” hit 18,000 searches worldwide last month, marking an all-time high.

For online business owners, this is the kind of product that sells itself with the right content. It solves a clear problem, and it’s easy to show off in short videos.

Today we have for you:

• Google-Agent brings user-driven AI agents to the web
• Amazon ends shared inventory model for FBA sellers

And:

• Beehiiv’s MCP turns AI into a newsletter operator
• The top eCommerce marketplaces of 2026
• Walmart’s ChatGPT checkout flops

Alright, let’s dive in.

Google

Amazon

Newsletters

Read All About It!

 150+ AI prompts to automate & grow your business: scale without hiring a team

This entrepreneur makes $1M/year from 20 plugins: multi-product playbook

Google’s March 2026 Spam Update already complete: done in less than a day

How foreign brands test the U.S. market: launch and scale in the U.S.

eCommerce

eCommerce

Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10064 – $100,000.00

display ads | lifestyle, home & garden

This is an established digital publishing website that is already approved and monetized through an exclusive publishing program, currently generating an average of $7,000 per month in revenue, with $6,700 in monthly average profit. The only expense is for a VA who edits and schedules the content. The site earns from platform-based distribution rather than traditional SEO, meaning you don’t need to rely on Google rankings or backlinks. Traffic is driven through a premium content ecosystem, and revenue is tied directly to views and engagement on the platform. The operation is simple and highly systemized. This is a turnkey, cash-flowing digital asset that is easy to operate and has clear room to scale for a buyer willing to expand content production. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #230 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “spices and condiments”.

A growing number of Americans, about 12% of the population, are now using GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. One unexpected side effect is how these drugs change taste, causing people to crave stronger, more intense flavors.

The result is a surge in demand for bold, flavorful condiments and spices, giving a whole new meaning to having a tasteful product portfolio.

We are already seeing this play out in the market, with brands like Bachan’s and Tapatío being acquired at premium valuations.

This opens the door for niche condiment brands, private label products, and ecommerce stores built around flavor, convenience, and better-for-you cooking. You can also pair your products with simple recipes, meal ideas, or even DIY guides that show customers how to create their own flavor-packed sauces at home.

Today we have for you:

• JD.com takes on Amazon with major European launch
• Amazon plans to move Prime Day to June

And:

• WordPress launches plugin checker to audit AI-generated plugins
• How to replace your 9-5 with an online income
• Doba launches verified Walmart integration for dropshippers

Alright, let’s dive in.

ecommerce

Amazon

WordPress

Read All About It!

How to revive inactive email lists without hurting deliverability: 7 steps

5 frameworks that made these newsletters $100M+: print money

Shopify adds USDC stablecoin to core payments stack: accept digital dollars

Top trending topics for March 2026: hottest search topics in the US

youtube

Dropshipping

Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10058 – $27,000.00

YouTube | lifestyle

The channel produces in-depth, educational, and entertainment-focused content centered on a specific luxury market. The content is evergreen and serves an excellent audience demographic (primarily male ages 35+) who have strong purchasing power, making the traffic valuable to potential advertisers and partners. Currently, the only revenue source is YouTube ads, which provides easy growth levers for a new owner. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #229 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Transcript

If you ever wanted to quit your job and replace your income with that sweet, sweet digital money of passive income that all the gurus are telling you about on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit and TikTok—oh, good news. I’m here to tell you how to do it, and also probably burst your bubble a bit. Let’s get into it.

So I got this question from an audience member: “How do I go about buying a business? Or how do I go about having an online business that allows me to leave my 9 to 5 job?”

Now, this is a very broad question. Honestly, I don’t think any blanket answer makes sense, so I’ll give you my opinion on it—the way I would do it if I was you and I was trying to escape the 9 to 5 by replacing my income with a digital business.

What I know is $5,000 to $7,000 a month in profit that I’m able to pay myself is what I would feel probably the most comfortable with to finally go out on my own, once you get your savings and all that kind of good stuff.

If you’re still in your 9 to 5, there are kind of two schools of thought. Either jump all the way into entrepreneurship, and that stress kind of carries you to the finish line—and a lot of entrepreneurs really thrive under that stress. I think that’s a bit of survivorship bias, personally, because if you look at the majority of businesses, they fail. I mean, that’s just the numbers.

Some people do thrive that way, but I would say a better way is to start working on the weekends or in the evenings, or whenever you have off time at your job, to build your online business—or to go buy one.

Now, when it comes to building or buying, I’m in favor of buying if you have the means to do so—if you have the ability to go and acquire a business. And when it comes to acquiring a business to replace your income, it’s probably not as big of a business as you think that you might need.

I just did our industry report, which you can download in the link down below or join our newsletter. If it’s not live yet, you’ll get prompted. The average sales multiple that we had hovered between like 28 and 31x of their monthly net income. So let’s say we’re at a 30x sales multiple.

For a business you acquire, you only need to acquire a $150,000 business to be making roughly around $5,000. Now, of course, that is profit and not salary going to you. That business requires reinvestment, and sometimes a lot more reinvestment depending on the business you’re going to buy. So maybe $300,000 is something you want to go to, just to pad that.

But let’s stick with $150,000 here and talk a little bit about what I recommend—the type of business I recommend for you.

If you’re going to go and buy a business while working a 9 to 5, I would recommend buying a business where you can be a little bit divorced in terms of active time to make the money.

And what I mean by that is: does this business require you to be on a sales call? If yes, that means active time to make money—to make the revenue. If the business does not require you to be active at the time that the revenue comes in, that is probably a better business for someone doing a more traditional 9 to 5.

So for example: an Amazon FBA business, an Amazon KDP business, even a faceless YouTube channel—it does not require you to be actively doing anything at the moment you make your revenue.

Now don’t get me wrong: the whole start of this video where I was bemoaning the gurus talking about passive income or replacing your 9 to 5 with an online business—I think they’re often full of shit. This is hard work. Even if you buy the business and it’s already proven, you are going to be doing work in order to maintain that investment, keep it going, and keep it profitable for you.

But that doesn’t mean you have to be there at the moment that the cash register rings. You still have to put in the work.

So I would first look at a business that does not require me to be active at the moment we make the money.

This also leads to another thing: I would look at acquiring a business that potentially I could leverage through paid media. I think organic is great. My background is SEO. I love SEO. I love content marketing—all that kind of stuff.

But I’m speaking from personal experience: you can get really burnt out doing a lot of organic content, and you just don’t have as much control as you do with paid media. Now, paid media is scary because you can spend a lot of money and ruin your wallet quite quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So I would recommend learning paid media and buying a business that you can utilize and leverage paid media with. Ideally, you can do that with faceless YouTube channels too—as long as the channel itself can support some kind of business outside of just being a YouTube channel.

But those are the two main things I would be looking at.

Me personally, I probably would buy a small Amazon FBA business, because physical product businesses—as you grow them—they tend to be very capital intensive and capital hungry, versus a KDP business where you’re selling a bunch of digital books. It’s not really the same kind of capital intensity that you’re going to go through as you scale a business like that.

So I would also look for businesses that don’t require a lot of capital to scale. Ideally, digital products of some sort, or services that don’t take a lot of time—things like that I think are great.

Now, I want to also talk about another thing you can do without spending $150,000 or $300,000 to go and buy a profitable business. If you are able to do some of the active activities—like being on a sales call or whatever—then I honestly think the shortest path for you to truly leave your 9 to 5 might be not buying a business at all, but rather starting a service business.

Service businesses are fantastic, especially when you begin, because you learn a lot of different skills all at once. You learn all the pains of fulfillment: how do you be a good salesperson? How do you be a good customer support person? How do you be a good marketer? Because you’ve got to market the services.

So there’s a lot of things going on here that you must learn, but it really sets you up really well to do a lot of other interesting things.

And I promise you: you do 100 cold calls in a day, you are never going to be afraid of sales again. You might still be bad at it, you might still suck, right? But you won’t be afraid of it anymore. Trust me.

As an introvert myself who has done cold calling before, I’m speaking from experience on that.

Service businesses are pretty cool because, unlike the businesses I just recommended (which are mostly low-ticket businesses), service businesses can be very high ticket—meaning you only need a couple sales every other month. And if it’s a recurring service, you may only need a few sales every few months, because if your churn is very low, that means customers are staying and paying you over and over again.

So I have a bunch of friends that have lifestyle marketing agencies doing $5k, $15k—some doing $30k and $40k a month—and they’re pretty chill with what they have set up now.

In order for that to happen, you must become extremely good at one narrow thing. Too many people that start a service business are all over the place. And again, speaking from personal experience—because massive ADHD—you need to focus on one thing. One thing you can get really, really good at.

Ideally, that one thing you need to charge between $1,000 to $5,000 monthly, or at least one-time. So that is what I recommend if you don’t want to go buy a business.

Now, that could be tricky if you have a 9 to 5, right? Because you are literally working during business hours. If you were like me working in the oilfield, it’s even trickier, because I wasn’t just working business hours—I was working 12 to 18 hours a day, and I would sometimes get a few days off.

So this was a very hard business model for me to pull off when I was trying to. But it is possible. I’ve known people to do it. Me doing that eventually led me to working at Empire Flippers as well, so it wasn’t all a loss.

But I do think high-ticket service businesses are some of the best ways for you to truly quit your 9 to 5. Now, I think it can be very difficult if you’re working a 9 to 5 to really master that.

If you are okay with it, another suggestion you can do—and you might take a pay cut depending on what you’re doing, and it might be a very scary thing for you to do—(but this is something I actually did do) is leave your job to go work at another company that does the thing you actually want to do.

As an entrepreneur, you can learn so much from doing this, right? So I was trying to learn marketing, trying to do my own marketing. I tried to get hired by marketing agencies. I had no college education or anything like that; I was just an oilfield guy, and I could not get anywhere.

But then Empire Flippers took a chance on me, and I took a massive pay cut from leaving the oilfield to go to a completely different industry. But I knew it’s the industry I wanted to be in. I wanted to work with entrepreneurs. I thought “business broker” sounded cool as hell. This is super cool—my clients are literally the entrepreneurs now, right?

So I was over the moon, and I learned a ton about marketing, sales, leadership, all sorts of stuff. It led to me speaking all around the world because I took that pretty big risk.

I had a mortgage back in Alaska when I took that risk—taking the biggest pay cut of my life to come and take this job—but it all worked out.

Now, that might be some survivorship bias on my part. So you always have to look at it and ask yourself: if I do this, what’s the worst thing that might happen to me?

If I buy a $150,000 KDP business, what’s the absolute worst thing? Well, I could lose $150,000, right? It could go totally to the ground, whether through my own incompetence or through an Amazon update, right? So how do you feel about that? Does that feel too scary of a risk? If it does, then maybe that’s not the right path for you.

If getting on the phone and doing high-ticket sales as, say, a marketing agency owner—or some other high-ticket service that you find or want to do or know how to do—what’s the worst thing that can happen there? Well, someone might yell at me, right? I might make some money, I might make nothing. And the worst thing is I spent almost nothing.

Maybe you spent like $300 or $1,000 on someone to yell at you and be quite rude—which, hey, I have people rude to me all the time. I do cold email, right? I generate a lot of fun responses from that.

So there’s less to lose in that way if you are risk-averse, right?

The third scenario: what’s the worst thing that can happen to me if I quit my job to go work at another job doing the thing I actually want to do as an entrepreneur? Well, maybe I’m not very good at it. This was my fear, by the way.

Maybe it turns out I’m really bad at it, and I will get fired, and now I have to go find a way to get back into my old industry that I really hated, and I have to come crawling back. That was one of my big fears.

But I took the risk. I said, if that happened, how would I feel? Probably terrible. But I’m glad that I tried—glad I attempted to do the thing I wanted to do.

And this all comes back down to another reason why I think this question is so prevalent online: “How do I replace my 9 to 5 with an online business?”

I mean, the answer is simple: do something that makes money—either the same amount or more than what you were making—and save up money for a rainy day. That’s always the true answer, no matter the context, basically. Right?

But people often ask this question because they’re actually asking a much deeper and harder question to answer: what kind of risk tolerance do I have?

Because you can go and quit your 9 to 5 today, right now, if you work your ass off and you really take the risk and you really learn—working 18, 20-hour days for that first 30 days. You probably can replace your income in month one.

But most people are not going to do that because, one, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of action-taking, really high stress, super risky.

So really, the answer to the question isn’t so much me telling you one thing you can do—such as going and buying a business from me (which you should do, right? Got to get that commission). But really: what kind of risk tolerance are you comfortable with?

So that’s the question you should really be asking: what kind of risk am I willing to take to get out of the 9 to 5? And if I take that risk, what is the worst thing that might happen? And if that thing does happen, am I okay with that? How do I feel about that?

And if you feel kind of like me—like that would suck, but it’s not the end of the world—I highly recommend you go do that thing. Because it sucking, but not being the end of the world, means you still have plenty of time to go do the next thing that might actually work.

Most entrepreneurs I’ve met—their first business was not successful. Usually they have a few failures, a bit of egg in their face the first couple times they go out there and try to do anything. So that’s completely normal.

So go and ask yourself what kind of risk you’re willing to take, and I look forward to hearing what you want to do. And if you want—if you’re comfortable with it—share it as a comment down below in this video.

Talk to you soon.

The post How to Replace Your 9-to-5 With an Online Business appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “dandruff combs”.

Dandruff might not be glamorous, but it can be profitable.

Around 50 million Americans deal with dandruff every year, making it one of the most common skin conditions out there.

Enter the dandruff comb. It’s not new or exciting, but it solves a very real problem.

For ecommerce businesses, it also checks a few important boxes. Dandruff combs are inexpensive to produce and ship, and they aren’t tied to seasonality or short-lived trends. Since dandruff is a year-round issue, demand for solutions stays consistent.

The product also performs well on social media. On TikTok, dandruff combs currently see about 22.2K searches per month. Search demand is strong too. Google recorded around 22K searches for “dandruff combs” last month, with interest up 16% over the past quarter.

While the product itself has a lower price point and smaller margins, its steady demand and strong content potential make it a practical addition for ecommerce brands looking to expand their catalog with simple, high-interest products.

Today we have for you:

• Amazon wins court order blocking Perplexity’s AI shopping agent
• AI Chatbots are boosting, not killing, online search

And:

• Amazon integrates third-party feeds into Shop Direct experience
• Hiring mistakes that slow down your business growth
• Claude Marketplace lets you use Claude Credits to buy third‑party AI apps

Alright, let’s dive in.

AI

Search & AI

Amazon

Read All About It!

Lessons learned from 48 hours with newsletter millionaires: biggest takeaways

Pinterest adds Amazon Storefront integration: easier to earn affiliate revenue

Best inventory management apps: improve forecasting, reduce stockouts

Google launches Merchant Center hub for agencies: available in U.S. & Canada

The Opportunity podcast

AI

Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10057 – Open to Offers

Amazon FBA, eCommerce | health & Wellness

Chill Seeker is a company in the cold plunge industry, selling DIY at-home cold plunge users. The product is a 2-pack of silicone ice block molds. Customers fill the molds with water, freeze it overnight, and the next day they have huge blocks of ice they can dump into their cold plunge. It’s a quality product with a unique selling proposition. The molds say CHILL, and easily stand out amongst competitors because it’s a fun and exciting product. This is not a white-label product. This is a proprietary product with a custom mold that creates a product unique from the others in the market. The business makes sales on Amazon FBA, but can extend much further with TikTok shop and other ecommerce strategies. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #228 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “lawn care”.

Spring hasn’t even arrived yet, and in some places, lawns are still covered in snow, but shoppers are already in full “backyard glow-up” mode.

According to Shopify data shared with Retail Brew, orders for irrigation gear jumped 105%, and sprinklers and herbicides rose 103%. And it doesn’t stop there. Gardening totes climbed 86%, fertilizers 72%, lawn mowers 69%, and mulch 63%. Even hoses (up 51%), landscaping plants (48%), and pots and planters (42%) are flying off shelves.

You can bundle products into “Spring Starter Kits,” create pre-season checklists, or offer early-bird discounts to capture demand before big box stores ramp up promotions.

Educational content like lawn prep guides, fertilizer schedules, or simple landscaping plans can help drive traffic and build trust. Subscription models for seasonal supplies could also turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Today we have for you:

• Our 2026 State of the Industry Report is here
• Amazon launches AI canvas to help sellers analyze their business data

And:

• Meta tests AI-powered product discovery inside its chatbot
• We’re hiring!
• How to use Claude Code to simplify SEO workflows

Alright, let’s dive in.

M&A

Amazon

Agentic Commerce

Read All About It!

The $1M solopreneur MVP: build and validate your product fast

How to start an online bookstore: turn books into business

Top trending topics for March 2026: hottest topics in the US right now

Amazon Seller Wallet launches in Europe: available for seven EU marketplaces

We’re Hiring

Google

Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10055 – $29,750.00

Display ads, affiliate | home & garden

GarageTransformed is provides helpful guides and design ideas for improving the look and functionality of your garage. Revenue is generated through display ads and Amazon Associates. Traffic is driven from Pinterest and organic search. Pinterest traffic circumvents risks from the Google algorithm and AI. The Lasso WordPress plugin handles Amazon Associates links, and can be easily updated to include a new affiliate tag. Content available for publishing includes 15 professionally written articles and 9 unpublished articles which detail garage schematics available for sale through an affiliate. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #227 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “cat furniture”.  

In 2023, 40 million households had at least one cat. In 2024, that jumped to 49 million, a 23% increase, according to the American Pet Products Association. At the same time, owners are spending more on pets they see as part of their family.

And they no longer want ugly beige carpeted cat trees or flimsy cardboard scratchers. Today’s cat owners want furniture that actually looks good in their homes.

Searches for “cat furniture” are up 45% over the last year, hitting 320,000 monthly searches. “Cat scratcher” is up 18%  with 169,000 monthly searches, and  “catios” are up 20%.

To claw your way into this market, focus on premium, design-led products that double as home décor rather than basic pet gear. Niching down into specific angles like small-space solutions or luxury statement pieces can help you stand out, too.

Today we have for you:

• Half of U.S. eCommerce now runs on Amazon and Shopify
• eBay buys Depop from Etsy for $1.2 billion

And:

• How Google Discover chooses what content to show
• Real-world lessons in acquisitions and deal-making
• 5 biggest mistakes that kill online business acquisitions

Alright, let’s dive in.

eCommerce

The Opportunity podcast

eCommerce

Read All About It!

The 10 best PPC Ad networks: decide where to invest your budget

A guide to sale multiples for 2026: for SaaS, media, eCommerce, & agencies

How Tyler Denk grew Beehiiv to $1M in 12 months: step by step

Tax prep for eCommerce: properly file your business tax returns

Top trending topics for February 2026: trending topics in the US right now

YouTube

Google

Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing #10058 – $27,000.00

YouTube | Lifestyle

The channel produces in-depth, educational, and entertainment-focused content centered on a specific luxury market. The content is evergreen and serves an excellent audience demographic (primarily male ages 35+) who have strong purchasing power, making the traffic valuable to potential advertisers and partners. Currently the only revenue source is YouTube ads, which provides easy growth levers for a new owner. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #226 appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Transcript

What’s up everyone? In this video today, I’m going to talk about the big mistakes that buyers make—usually newbie buyers who are just starting out and want to go acquire a profitable business.

Now, sometimes those people are working a 9 to 5. They’re middle management. They come to a platform like Empire Flippers. They try to get at least that sweet, sweet, bitter juice that is entrepreneurship by acquiring a business.

Or maybe they’re an entrepreneur themselves. They built up a business that is doing well, but they’ve never actually bought a business. And they might be making mistakes that are pretty common, even with the 9 to 5 guys who may not own a business yet.

So let’s cover these five mistakes that I have seen play out to either “you got lucky” or absolutely disastrous results. So let’s get into it.

The first mistake is overleveraging. Now, buying a business is one of the greatest shortcuts I know to making some incredible wealth and having a leverage system to do it that allows you to live a pretty amazing lifestyle once you get the hang of what you’re doing.

Buying a business allows you to skip a lot of the zero-to-one problems that a lot of people get absolutely stuck in—an endless hell/purgatory type of environment trying to get that startup off the ground. So buying a business has tons of advantages.

But one thing that is quite common, and I think it’s going to become increasingly common, is buyers trying to buy a business with too much leverage. Now, when I talk about leverage, I’m mostly talking about money, but there’s also things like skill leverage and tech leverage.

So if you buy a software company that really needs a CTO—really needs someone that’s tech-enabled—and you are not, then you might be overleveraging in the skill department. Like, your main engineer leaves, you’re kind of screwed unless you have good documentation to back it up. But I’m mostly talking about financing here.

I see this growing as a problem because there are a lot of gurus on YouTube, TikTok, wherever you hang out, that talk about buying a business with no money down. And I have discussed this topic many, many times on this channel alone.

And the truth is: those deals do exist. You can buy a business with $0 down out of your own pocket, right? People will poo-poo on me all day and say, “No, that’s not true,” but it absolutely is true. You absolutely can do it.

The real question people need to ask is: should you do it? And that’s a very different question.

Because usually these no-money-down kind of deals are really “no money out of pocket” kind of deals. That means you are not taking any money out of your wallet, but you are still giving the seller a ton of money, usually through creative financing, an SBA loan, or some kind of mix of capital leverage.

The issue is, you can go ahead and do that, and I have friends that do it, and they are comfortable with that kind of risk. But if you’re a brand-new buyer, this is a situation where you’re setting yourself up for failure, most likely.

Because the more debt you put onto a business, the more leverage you have on the business, the more your profit margin shrinks. And when your profit margin shrinks, that means the business has less of an opportunity to weather some pretty chaotic storms that you may not see coming on the horizon.

So you always want to maintain as thick of a profit margin as you possibly can when you go and acquire a business, because that is the way you will have some breathing room if a storm does happen. You can start adapting and changing and trying to figure things out versus being underneath this high pressure from paying this debt or paying investors.

In general, you don’t want to overleverage super, super hard when you buy these businesses because you want to protect that profit margin. It’s your shield when you go into battle with your acquisition.

Now, I’m not saying don’t ever use leverage. In fact, I actually recommend using leverage. I think that’s a good thing. Just like buying a piece of real estate, you’re not shelling out all cash for that piece of real estate. You’re usually getting some kind of mortgage, right? That’s financing or using leverage.

There’s nothing wrong with leverage. I think it can be an amazing tool. But buyers wanting to get this crazy good deal where they spend none of their own personal money often kind of buy themselves into a corner that is very difficult to win from, because your profit margin shrinks so low.

Now, what is a safe amount of leverage? Well, it really depends on your risk tolerance. I have friends that will leverage it to the gills—like 100% leverage—and they’re totally okay with it. They are very experienced entrepreneurs and they know what they’re doing. So for them, it’s not that risky. They understand the risks involved and how to handle those risks, and how to handle that business they’re acquiring.

For you, if you’re brand new, I wouldn’t recommend putting more than 50% of the net profit into leverage. Now, what I mean by that is: if you buy a business that’s making, say, 60 grand a month in profit, you should not have debt payments that exceed 30 grand a month. That way you always have a nice, cushy $30,000 in net profit to actually use to grow the business and pay yourself.

Now, in that situation, you still run risk, right? If you drop below where you can’t handle that debt repayment, there are going to be problems, obviously, with your lender. But the business needs to drop pretty significantly for that to happen. So you’re setting yourself up to be a little bit more conservative.

If that seems like too much risk for you, just lower your leverage. That’s totally fine. People buy businesses all the time with 100% cash, so there’s nothing wrong with that either.

But I know a lot of people don’t typically have a cool million dollars just burning in their wallet to go buy a business, right? So usually leverage is part of the game when you start acquiring bigger businesses. You shouldn’t be afraid of it. You should use it as a tool. Just don’t get super hyped up on all these guru videos telling you to leverage to the hilt, because that’s most likely going to be a bad move for most people.

The second mistake I see people make is related to the first, which is no working capital.

If you buy a business for, let’s say, a million dollars—perfect, you got a business. It’s probably making around 30 grand profit per month. But now you need to buy the inventory. You probably didn’t think about that part, right?

Some business brokers include the inventory in the price. Some business brokers do not. Like, we don’t include it in the business price, so we don’t take a commission on the inventory. There might be some caveats where we have done that in the past, but usually we don’t.

Let’s say it’s $200,000 to buy the inventory. Now, okay, you can work out a deal with the seller where you pay them for that inventory over a period of time as it sells. That’s very, very common.

But what happens when you need to invest another 30, or 50, or 60 thousand dollars into scaling up how much inventory you have, running a new marketing campaign, changing up your infrastructure, maybe needing to hire a few A players—or several C players?

All that kind of stuff you need to consider, because just because you bought the business and you spent that money doesn’t mean you’re done spending money. In fact, you’re probably spending even more money over the lifetime of owning the business than you did to acquire the business.

The key is you want the business to grow—grow beyond what you bought it for—ideally, right? But a lot of buyers, especially brand new buyers, just think, “Oh, I only need a million dollars and I’ll be making $30,000 a month. Awesome.” But that’s not really how it works.

So you have to take some of that 30 grand a month and put it back into the business to keep it growing, keep the engines running. Maybe at 30 grand a month, you’re paying yourself 5 or 10 grand a month. It depends on the business. I have friends that pay themselves everything, but they have different businesses than an Amazon FBA business.

But you want to always consider: what is the working capital needed to run this business, not only sustainably, but on a growth trajectory? So always think about that before you acquire the business.

The next mistake I see is buyers just not being adaptable. And this actually is a mistake that sellers have too, to be honest. It’s not just a buyer thing. In fact, I would say the problem might be even worse with sellers than it is with buyers.

But in general, you want to be adaptable. You want to be flexible. One of the ways that I see this—and I have personal experience with this—is: you go buy a business, you think you have the financing lined up, and then that gets pulled out from you. Well, what now?

If you only had one way to acquire that business, then the seller might be like, “Hey man, unless it’s all cash, this sounds kind of risky. I don’t know if it’s going to work,” blah, blah, blah. “I’m going to go talk to these buyers; they seem to have better acquisition systems than you.”

So we always want to get leverage in there if we can. But let’s say the lender backs out at the last minute. Now, is there another way to do the deal?

What I would recommend is having multiple ways to get a deal done. Cash is obviously king, but depending on the size of the business, that might not always be realistic.

So maybe you have some cash, you have some debt, and maybe you’re also selling off some equity to some private investors who want to get in on the business. Or maybe you’re partnering up with someone who is providing the cash injection as well, and they’re going to help you operate the business.

Having multiple different ways, or multiple different deal structures, thought out before you make the offer—and as you get deeper into the offer—can really help you get the deal done.

One, it shows the seller, like, “Hey, he’s flexible.” He’s really thought this through: what happens if X happens, or Y happens, or Z happens? And he has A, B, C to meet those problems head-on.

You might still lose the deal, even having multiple ways to acquire it, but the seller is more likely to be open to working with you if you do something like this.

Now, mistake number four—which is a personal pet peeve for business brokers (and I think I can speak for all business brokers on this), and probably even more so for a seller—is taking too long during due diligence.

Due diligence is the process: you’ve signed the NDA, you sign the letter of intent, and the exclusive DD period has begun. Exclusive DD typically means it’s just you now looking at the business. No one else can look at the business. You and the seller are often talking, probably on a weekly cadence, all that kind of stuff, and you’re just making sure the business is legit. It matches not only what you want, but it actually is a legitimate business too.

At Empire Flippers, we do vetting. Sometimes we miss stuff, but usually we’re pretty good on it. This is like your version of vetting, right?

Most of the time, depending on the size of the business, an exclusive due diligence period may be between 30 to 90 days. Now, I’ve seen it stretch on much longer than that, and this is the problem.

If buyers are not motivated to move quick, they will sometimes go much longer than that 30- or 90-day period. So let’s say you and the seller agree to 90 days of due diligence to buy a $3 million business. Now we’re on day 91, and you need another two or three months.

This is bad because not only are you telling the seller you could not get the thing done in time as agreed upon—so now you’re becoming unreliable—but the seller is also putting in a lot of extra effort and not getting anything from you yet, while supplying you with really intimate data.

They’re opening up their kimono to you—trusting you that you are going to be able to do the deal. So it feels disrespectful to the seller.

Now, you might say, “Well, they just have to deal with it.” But here’s another issue: you might end up actually paying a whole lot more money for going beyond this due diligence period.

There have been many, many times at Empire Flippers over the years—and we’ve sold 2,500 businesses—so we’ve seen a lot of this. This is not the majority, by the way, so don’t worry, my sellers, but it does happen.

A buyer will go sometimes six months into due diligence, get the seller to keep agreeing, keep agreeing, and then we finally get it done. The buyer’s ready to go, the lawyers are all good, it’s locked and loaded, and the seller says, “Hey, hold on a minute. This business is fundamentally different than what it was six months ago. I am now making way more profit than I was six months ago, yet you’re still going to buy me at the price from six months ago? No. We’re repricing it to where the business is actually valued today.”

Now, depending on how the buyer is going to buy the business, that might be no problem. Maybe they’re like, “Hey, okay, whatever. I get it.” Another way a buyer might respond is like, “No way. I’m not buying it now.”

Sometimes buyers will use this due diligence waiting trick to see if the business grows because they think in their mind they got it locked in at a certain price, but they don’t—unless that was something the seller agreed to before that DD began.

So the seller is totally in their right to back out of the deal, because they don’t want to leave a bunch of money on the table. Which means you end up paying a lot more money.

We actually had a very funny experience years ago where a business, every single month, was increasing its profit pretty dramatically. The buyer thought he was being smart by waiting to make the seller more desperate—“I know I’m buying my business, I’m going to get it for lower,” right?

But every single month, when we repriced it—unlike other brokers, we tend to reprice all of our businesses every single month—it just kept going up and up and up. I think by month three he finally just bought the business because he didn’t want the price to keep going up on him. That backfired on him.

Another area where this could be a real, terrible situation for you as a buyer is if you are using financing. If you’re using traditional financing, like an SBA loan, for example, to acquire an Amazon FBA business, and at the end of your DD the seller’s like, “No, I want to reprice this to the actual reality of the business,” because so much time has passed—guess what you’ve got to do again?

You’ve got to go through the entire SBA underwriting process again, because that changes all the numbers. It changes everything.

An SBA loan can easily take two to three months to really be done and cleared, and the money sent, and everything is over. It can be a Herculean process to get through one of those. This also applies to other loans as well, not just SBA, but usually more traditional loans.

They need to underwrite those numbers, and those numbers need to be locked in. They don’t care that the business is way more profitable now—they have to redo the entire underwriting process.

That buyer will now probably have to come up with more of a cash injection for the loan as well. So it creates all sorts of wrenches in your plans if you take too long to do diligence.

You should be doing due diligence on a very clear timeline: this is what I’m doing at week one, this is what I’m doing at week two, this is what I’m doing at week three.

And you should be in communication with the seller and with the broker. If you’re buying a business with us, you should be telling us what is going on, because it’s very, very important that there’s not radio silence. That’s the last thing you want to do during due diligence.

Let’s say something did come up. Be like, “Hey, I need another month to do DD because X, Y, Z. I just want to make sure we’re still locked in at this price, and I get that time to do that extra month. Otherwise, maybe we need to call the deal.”

It’s better for you to be the one to say something like that versus the seller, because you’re controlling your own acquisition timeline that way.

That’s a big mistake I see a lot of buyers make, even experienced buyers. Sometimes buyers think they’re going to get an amazing deal by doing this—by waiting—and in my experience, that is not what happens.

All right, the final mistake that buyers make is no post-acquisition planning.

Again, this kind of goes back to the working capital thing. Like, “Oh, I bought the business, it’s over.” No, it’s not over. In fact, you just finished the prologue of your journey with this book of business you’ve just started reading. Now you’re at the helm of the seat. Now you can start doing stuff with the business you’ve acquired.

You’d be surprised at how few people have a cohesive post-acquisition plan for the thing they bought.

There was a business we sold years ago for almost purely a $1 million business. The buyer bought that business, put the website on hold, and had a little placeholder that says, “New redesign coming soon.”

I remember thinking, what a strange thing to do. You could have just kept the site as-is and still be making money while you’re working on the redesign, so it’s not this massive interruption to the business.

I fast-forward like two years, I go back to the website, and it still says, “New redesign coming soon.” Wow. This guy bought a million-dollar business and did nothing. He did nothing but probably destroyed the entire business. I have no idea what the plan was there. Sometimes people are weird. You think, how could someone waste that much money? But it is what it is.

That is an extreme example. What I mean is: you should have a post-acquisition plan. What are you going to do to the business? How are you going to improve upon the business? What are the steps? What are the timelines?

When you first acquire a business, I often say you shouldn’t do anything for 30 days except run the business as the seller was running it. Because this is a new thing for you, right? Even if you’re an experienced entrepreneur, you’re new to running the business.

So you should really learn the ins and outs and establish a normal benchmark before you start changing around those benchmarks and doing other stuff with it.

Usually, I recommend the first 30 days you do basically nothing. But then you should have a 90-day plan, 180-day plan. What’s your end goal? Are you trying to flip this business—trying to sell it down the road for 3.4x of what you bought it for? Or is it going to be part of some kind of strategic acquisition? Is it part of a synergistic portfolio you have with your holding company?

How does this business grow for you? What are you going to do to grow that business? Very, very important.

And again, the reason why this happens is because buyers get so thrilled with the idea of buying a business—and it is really fun buying a business—that they forget this whole other thing called running the acquisition that you acquired.

So there you have it: five mistakes I see newbie buyers, all the way up to even veteran buyers. I’ve seen equity people make these mistakes as well.

So I’m not at all saying just because you’re still working a 9 to 5 or whatever that these private equity people are better than you. They make all these same mistakes as well. So you’re in good company if you’re making one of these mistakes.

But now that you know, you know not to make those mistakes.

So come on over—come on over to empireflippers.com. Let’s help you buy a business. Talk to you soon.

The post 5 BIGGEST Mistakes That Kill Online Business Acquisitions appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Transcript

Hey everyone, it’s Greg, and today I’m going to discuss five different M&A predictions from our new industry report.

If you’re not familiar with us, we’ve sold over 2,500 businesses and made over 90 people millionaires as an M&A brokerage. I just compiled a ton of data for the last year. Last year, we sold 161 businesses, which is actually up from, I believe, 146. If you want the actual numbers, you can go download our industry report. It’s not out yet, but it will be soon, so join our email newsletter.

If you want to download it now, you can find it in the link in the description down below if we have published it by the time this video comes out.

With that said, things are in an interesting place. It’s still a rough market, it’s still a struggle to get deals done, but unlike 2024, it’s been a much easier year—in quotations—to get deals done. I put them in quotations because we still have to really represent our sellers. We really have to meet where the buyers are, and we really have to help sellers get to where they need to be in order to actually transact a deal successfully.

But I am pretty cautiously optimistic for 2026 that the M&A market is going to continue to see a good recovery, even in the digitally native businesses that we specialize in.

With that said, let’s talk about my predictions.

Prediction number one: I believe faceless YouTube channels are going to become much more popular as assets that people buy and sell.

Now, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen affiliate sites really take a big wound to the stomach as Google’s algorithm started getting crazier and crazier. AI has come on the scene and has really rocked the boat for pretty much all the content-based business models. But one that seems to be sticking around pretty well is faceless YouTube channels.

Faceless YouTube channels might start filling that role that affiliate sites used to have in a bigger way than they even did in 2025. And part of that is the advent of AI. There are more and more channels getting started using these AI tools, and the AI tools themselves are actually getting better and better and better.

I think this is going to be a place where a lot of beginner buyers—newbies to the M&A world who just want to dip their toes to buy a profitable asset—will probably start. Because, similar to affiliate sites, YouTube channels are also very beginner-friendly. There are just not that many moving pieces to them, right? You create the content, you optimize it for the algorithm, and happy days—you get the AdSense revenue.

Now, I will say, as I always say when I bring this up (and something I said for years with affiliate sites too), if you are going to be buying a YouTube channel—or even building one, for that matter—I always recommend that YouTube can be the start of your focus. But you really should be building a business that doesn’t purely rely on YouTube. Because if you do, you’re going to find yourself eventually in a similar position as the affiliate site people found themselves in.

Either when Amazon decreased their affiliate fees—which a lot of these type of businesses relied heavily on via the Amazon Associates program—or when Google SEO changed dramatically in terms of presenting content sites, where they lost almost all their traffic.

So I think these are great little businesses. I think you can actually sell pretty big ones. I think we came close to a seven-figure business in that space earlier last year. But you should always be thinking ahead.

If you are an acquirer of faceless YouTube channels, it’s okay to buy one that is just always going to be a YouTube business. I’m not saying that is wrong. But if you want to be less risky, I would recommend looking at faceless YouTube channels where you can grow beyond just YouTube.

If the channel is about health and fitness, is there a possibility for you to make a digital course? Is there a possibility for you to sell a high-ticket service on the back end of that, where that organic YouTube traffic becomes a marketing channel for your real service?

That is what I always recommend. The more you can control your own business and control all the different levers—and owning your own offer allows you to do that probably better than almost anything—because now you suddenly have the profit margin to go and explore all these other marketing channels that are happening right now.

But with that said, I do think YouTube channels are going to continue to explode in popularity in 2026.

Prediction number two: valuations in 2026 will stabilize, or maybe potentially start ticking back up a bit.

Which is great because, like, if you’re selling your business, of course you want to get as much money as humanly possible, right? Within reason, of course. We still want to make sure our buyers are getting a good deal too.

But this stabilization comes pretty much after almost three years of decline when it comes to M&A assets—at least digital, digitally native assets like what we sell. And this decline was, in a lot of ways, not so much the market falling out as much as the market correcting back to normal.

What I mean by that is we have come down from this massive COVID bump that way overvalued a lot of these digital businesses. And in 2025, it didn’t go down noticeably in any massive, terrifying way. In some cases, we sold deals higher than average—higher than normal—even surprising us at times.

So I think in 2026, we’re going to see these continue to stabilize, and valuations might tick back up. Because in 2025, what we saw was a lot more buyer interest coming back onto the market.

Now, buyers were more hesitant in terms of what they choose to look at and the kind of deals they were making. But overall, we saw more buyers come onto our marketplace in 2025 than we did in 2024, which tells me that the appetite is starting to come back to go and acquire these assets.

Of course, more demand and less supply should increase prices if that demand keeps growing—which I think it will in 2026. Now, there is a caveat to me saying that, which I’ll get into here soon, but this is very good news for sellers.

As long as you, as a seller, come in with realistic expectations of what your business is worth, you have a very good chance of selling your business in 2026 and potentially becoming one of the millionaires we’ve helped make over the years.

Prediction number three: service businesses go through a profit margin renaissance.

I’ve been saying this for most of 2025—at least half of the year. I’ve been saying it to my friends who own marketing agencies, and even to my offline friends that just own more traditional service businesses.

Historically speaking, service-based businesses were always very labor-intensive—like Empire Flippers. We’re a very labor-intensive company, right? We’re M&A advisors, we have vetting, we have customer service, we have a sales team, we have a marketer—all sorts of people. That really shrinks the profit margin.

But in 2026—and I think we already saw a lot of this in 2025—I think these service businesses, especially marketing agencies, are going to see a big boom to their profit margin. And the reason why is because of the elephant in the room, which you know what I’m about to say: artificial intelligence. All right, it’s AI.

So I see AI coming in and really changing the game. And not just AI, obviously, the banner child here, but also automations are getting better too, and these two things are often lumped in together anyway.

There are things coming out like AI SDRs, AI account—there’s AI customer service, chatbots. And so a lot of the money that used to go to labor, whether it’s low-pay or high-pay labor, is suddenly now free because AI can do a lot of these things now.

There’s always the argument, “Well, can it do it well?” Maybe humans will probably almost always be better than AI if they’re trained and skilled at the job. But you don’t always need the most skilled person to get the job done.

In fact, I’ve used AI to help me speed up writing my industry report. Now, every word in that report is written by me, but I used a first draft to look through it all, get more ideas, and get more clarity on what I was trying to write, which allowed me to write this a lot faster than what I’ve written in years past.

If you’ve ever downloaded one of my industry reports, they’re pretty big—well over 5,000 words typically. I think the biggest one I did was like 15,000 words. It’s almost a novella on the industry. So it’s a pretty Herculean task.

I think the explosive increase in quality is probably going to slow down. But as business adoption grows more and more with AI, I see service businesses having an absolute renaissance when it comes to their profit margin.

Prediction number four: I mentioned valuations and a caveat. It’s actually two caveats, and four and five are kind of related in terms of my predictions.

Number four is micro SaaS is going to be threatened more by AI in 2026.

Right now, there are tons of businesses that are paying every single month for all kinds of bespoke and niche SaaS tools, some of which only serve one purpose—to do a certain thing that the entrepreneur needs done.

I think in 2026—because we already saw in 2025—more and more of these entrepreneurs are either going to vibe code their own solution themselves or hire an engineer who vibe codes one for them really, really quickly and get rid of those monthly payments.

There are also private equity funds that have started to pick up some steam. I don’t think they have become mainstream by any means, but they’ve certainly gotten some attention. Basically, their whole premise is: let’s rebuild SaaS tools that people love, where they only have to pay one time and they can host themselves.

And I see this continuing to be a trend. You look on AppSumo, there’s tons of software coming out of the gate, out of nowhere, that’s pretty good, that is all AI-created, and it’s lifetime deals—a one-time purchase.

This could be a real threat to the whole dream of SaaS, which is a recurring revenue piece. Because why would someone pay every month when they can just use something like Cursor and some general knowledge that they can augment with Claude to tell them what to do to build their own little software app—if they’ve got the time to do that?

I think it’s pretty clear to me that micro SaaS is not going to be extinct in 2026. You can still build them, it can still be a great asset, you can still sell and buy them. But I do think they’re going to be more under threat.

Which leads me to my next prediction.

Prediction number five: AI valuations may not pop in 2026, but they might start deflating a bit.

Over the last couple years, we’ve seen AI businesses get absolutely insane valuations—more so than even SaaS valuations, which was usually always the king of this when it comes to what businesses sell for the most. It’s almost always SaaS.

I think there will be a default inflation here because at this point, investors have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars. In some cases, like a billion dollars—like Meta just acquired Manas for a pretty penny thing. That was the fastest exit at that level of acquisition in history. I could be wrong on that—go fact check me.

What I’m trying to say is these investors have already spent all this money. Now they’ve acquired, and in some cases, they’ve had these acquisitions for almost a couple years at this point, which might be the breaking point that starts putting the actual brakes on the valuations of AI.

Because as it starts seeing the return isn’t as good as they initially thought, the profit is still not there. And some of these big companies, like OpenAI, just had a whole controversy of like they’re not doing too well in the P&L.

So I think a lot of these AI softwares are going to be in that space. Also, OpenAI or Claude—if they start trying to go towards real profitability, there’s a good chance that the price of the AI tokens will probably increase to try to compensate and actually get a profit margin going there, which in turn will be costs that are passed down to the entire user base—the entire stack.

And since a lot of these AI tools—at least the ones that my friends in my space are making—are in a lot of ways just wrappers (they’re API wrappers of ChatGPT, of Claude; I think a couple of them are Grok now as well), if you increase the price of the tokens, that can fundamentally change the economics of these AI software startups as well.

They’re primarily utilizing one of these big LLMs—or all the LLMs combined—and that could really rock their world.

But if this prediction is true, I actually have some very, what I consider, wise advice for my friends out there watching this who are building AI tools. And that is: you need to either build your AI business so fast that you can sell at a premium this year.

I think this might be one of the final years where you can get a really crazy valuation on even a ChatGPT-wrapper software—as long as you build a little bit of a moat with your marketing and kind of your infrastructure.

Or the second option: you need to go raise an obscene amount of money so you don’t become obsolete.

Which I think is the other big elephant in the room for people building in this space, because the technology is moving very, very quickly. I think the next big jump is probably going to be longer than a lot of people think. But these little tiny improvements—where a lot of these improvements are the basis of these smaller AI businesses, where they tweak something that the LLM doesn’t do normally—the LLM could just come out with a feature that does that.

I have a friend—this was a couple of years ago—he built a little chatbot business using AI up to like 25K a month. Then I think it was OpenAI that absolutely crushed him when they unleashed a feature, basically for free, that did the exact same thing as his business. And that business was wrecked basically overnight.

And I think there’s a real potential threat here that that will happen continuously, even if we don’t see a big marked improvement in the AI quality over the next year or so.

This is a double-edged sword. People in the AI space, I think they’re most under threat by this type of mentality. But people that are in the e-commerce space, in the marketing agency space—I already mentioned the service profit renaissance that might be coming up—I think you guys are in a very good position here.

Because unlike the people that are building an AI startup, you’re just using an AI tool. So it might be a pain in the butt to switch, but it’s pretty easy to switch, all things considered—relatively speaking—to the better AI when one comes out.

So you get the advantage of always being able to use the best in class, rather than having to invest all this time and money and R&D into trying to remain best in class. Because if you’re not best in class, there’s a good chance you’re going to get eaten up by someone else who did.

I think there’s other stuff that’s going to happen. I think there’s going to be a continued increased interest in DTC e-commerce.

We’ve had a weird year when it comes to global logistics, with tariffs that are going on and off and on and off. And I thought that was going to be a big problem for us in 2025—and it was, don’t get me wrong. There were problems with it, but it was nowhere near as big as I thought it was going to be.

I thought it was going to affect us much more deeply than it did. And hey, we sell a ton of e-commerce stores—both DTC and Amazon FBA—so anyone who’s going to get super affected by this should have been us in terms of the brokerage.

And there was a little bit of that, not going to lie. There were people who pulled out because of it. Buyers were uncertain. Some sellers decided not to sell because they didn’t know how to handle the changes to their P&L basically with the different tariff charges.

But as 2025 ended, looking back on it, it wasn’t as crazy as I thought it was going to be. We still got a lot of deals done. We sold more deals in 2025 than 2024. So obviously there’s still a lot of buyer interest, because the majority of businesses we sell tend to be physical product businesses.

And I think in 2026, we’re going to see that continue. Despite the media, the rhetoric, the on-and-off-again tariffs, entrepreneurs are nothing if not incredibly adaptable. And I have high faith that we’re going to sell more e-commerce stores in 2026.

All right, so those are my predictions, with a little bonus one there at the end.

If you want to read my industry report, like I said, if it’s published by the time this video comes out, you’ll be able to find the link in the description down below. If not, and if you’re not subscribed to our email newsletter, go ahead and subscribe.

You’ll get a weekly email from us called This Week in M&A that covers the high-level news of the industry right at your fingertips, and you will be the first one to hear when the industry report goes live.

Talk to you soon.

The post 5 M&A Predictions for 2026 (From 2,500+ Business Sales) appeared first on Empire Flippers.

Today’s trend of the week is “phone wrist straps”.

Often, the simplest products are the best. Enter phone wrist straps.

Phone accessories are always in demand, but this simple accessory is quickly becoming a must-have for its simple functionality in making phones easier to carry and reducing the risk of dropping them.

Google searches for phone wrist straps hit 54,000 worldwide last month, up 48% from the previous month. On TikTok, interest is exploding, with a 30-day views growth of 745%.

Wrist straps are cheap to produce, lightweight to ship, and easy to customize to fit your branding. You can also bundle them with existing products to increase average order value. Sometimes, a small add-on can unlock a big revenue boost.

Today we have for you:

• The 53% drop in SaaS AI traffic isn’t a SaaSpocalypse
• Just 1.6% of sellers now drive half of Amazon third party revenue

And:

• WordPress introduces a built-in AI assistant for site editing
• Optimizing your Amazon listings for Rufus and AI search
• OpenAI and Udemy bring courses directly into ChatGPT

Alright, let’s dive in.

SaaS

The Opportunity podcast

Amazon

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The state of M&A 2026 report: insights from advisors and brokers

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Money Nomad

Looking for a side hustle?

Try Money Nomad, our sister marketplace built specifically for profitable side hustles and micro-businesses that are too small for Empire Flippers.

Check out this recent listing available on the Money Nomad Marketplace:

Listing M20148 – $749,000.00

eCommerce | Health  & fitness

This is a premium, performance-driven eCommerce brand operating in the rapidly expanding recovery, biohacking, and longevity space. Launched in February 2023, the brand has quickly scaled in lifetime sales, driven by high-ticket products. With a strong brand identity centered around discipline, strength, and mental resilience, the business has built a loyal and engaged customer base, impressive repeat purchase rates, and outstanding customer satisfaction — positioning it as a highly attractive acquisition in the high-AOV wellness category. Learn More

The post This Week in M&A Issue #225 appeared first on Empire Flippers.