My experience as a first time business buyer (part 2: 6 months later)

Here's part 1:
https://www.searchfunder.com/post/my-experience-as-a-first-time-business-buyer

Ok so my first post was a month after closing. It's now been 6 months.

Everything I said in the first post is still valid. I would like to add something that I think other Searchers are probably going to see in their search. There are a lot of statistics about how so many of the small businesses in the U.S. are owned by older generations and that we are going to see a big transfer of business ownership from those retiring owners to younger buyers. These stats resonate with me because during my year long search for a business to buy I made offers on a lot of businesses that were being sold by owners looking to retire and I eventually bought a business from owners who were retiring. So what does that mean for Searchers?

Well, that means that Searchers are going to be buying a lot of businesses with antiquated systems (or no systems lol). I looked at 2 businesses that had no ability to accept payments outside of cash or check. One of those businesses was owned by a guy who didn't like computers so he ran his business on yellow legal pads (I'm not kidding). From my perspective this is both a positive and a negative. Increasing efficiency by updating antiquated systems can be a "quick win" to improve the business. It also means bigger initial capital expenditure, more time needs to be dedicated to training, and a period of overlap where you are still running the business the original way while implementing new software (possibly needing to do duplicate work while both systems are being used). I've had to do this much more than I ever expected. I had to get a new CRM and software to track our jobs, only to have to switch again a few months later when I realized I picked a CRM/software that didn't fully do everything we needed it to do.

So it has basically taken me the entire first six months to implement all the technological upgrades that I wanted for the business I purchased. It's sounds so easy to say just get a dispatching software and start using it. But you need to keep in mind tons of variables that are hard to integrate, such as connecting your ordering software to all your vendor accounts so that you have up-to-date pricing. Bigger vendors don't want to give credit or link their data to very small business or businesses with LLC less than a year old.