Chapter 1: How did Cem Atik generate $2 billion in revenue without founding a company?
Welcome to The Proven Podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove. On this episode, Jem Atik, the German operator who's generated $2 billion in revenue buying, scaling, and selling SaaS and e-commerce companies, breaks down how to spot undervalued businesses, fix what's broken, and scale them into massive exits. The show starts now. All right, everybody, welcome back.
Cam, I'm excited to have you on the show.
Have you to be here.
Chapter 2: What strategies does Cem use to find undervalued businesses?
So there's a couple of people out here who know about sales and they know about scaling and they know about SaaS, but they might not know about you. So give everybody a little bit of an idea of what you've done, the revenue that you've generated. Give everybody a little bit of detail who you are and what you've done.
Sure. Yeah, I'm Sam from Germany, basically a small marketing nerd, I would say. And I make my passion to my job and also like, yeah, like my roadmap that I just want to share with people, I would say.
Chapter 3: What A/B testing strategies does Cem recommend for scaling businesses?
So what I do is really simple. We buy businesses, we scale them, and then we sell them.
Chapter 4: What are the critical unit economics to consider when acquiring businesses?
Really simple. Mainly, we are just talking about e-commerce and SaaS businesses. Um, yeah, to just keep it quick.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. So, but when you talk about doing that, you've generated a certain number of revenue and sales and scaling. Can you talk a little bit about that to get the audience to go, what the heck? Cause Sam, it's a, it's a huge thing that you've done.
Yeah, when we were just talking about how much revenue we generate for businesses we are actively, yeah, was working on, yeah, we reached last year $2 billion.
So little numbers, nothing big, little numbers there.
Chapter 5: Why is selling the result more effective than selling the product?
So you've done two billion revs for the companies that you didn't even start. You just acquired them. You scale them. You systematize them. You go from there. So a lot of people are going to have a lot of questions going, okay, I have a SaaS company. I want to own a SaaS company. I want to buy companies. Let's go through this whole process.
Let's go through when you're looking for businesses to buy, and then we'll get to what we're doing if you're scaling one. When you're looking for businesses to buy that are these SaaS companies, where are you looking and what are you looking for?
So the first thing is, a couple of years before, when we were starting with this idea, I was thinking like, okay, how we can do that? And I just... I just trade since I'm 19 a lot, and I was thinking about Warren Buffett.
Chapter 6: How can AI be leveraged as a decision-making tool in business?
What he does is pretty much the same, only in another industry. He just tries to figure out really undervalued businesses, get involved, and grow together with them. And that's basically a pretty similar process. We do it a bit differently. Because we're especially looking also for businesses that are going close to being bankrupt sometimes.
So buying a business out from the insolvency, it's a huge leverage for us. Just imagine a business that makes 30 million revenue last year can be maybe sold this year for 1 million, which is insanely cheap for sure. That's one thing. And the second thing is we usually, I mean, this is more a network thing. So it's not like you can do a lot of ads for it or you just can talk about it.
We already do ads for that in Europe. But mainly these contacts or these leads or businesses that could be interesting for us coming over our M&A network. Over the last years and also because we are investor-backed, Happy to be able to say that.
We have a huge M&A network, over 200, 300 M&A consultants that are interested to just give us the best possible deals because they know that the percentages that we share are much higher than the competition.
Chapter 7: What practical steps should new SaaS founders take to ensure success?
So you win with money, basically. So that means if an M&A consultant usually get 5%, we pay him maybe 7%, yeah, that he gives us the good leads.
Sounds bad, but the world, it is like it is. It's just how the world is, absolutely. I did this with real estate for years where, you know, your real estate agents, they're going to get 1% or 2% of whatever they sell. I'm like, well, I'll give you 6%. And all of a sudden, all the deals come to me first. I was like, it's not complicated. It's just how the world works.
Now, when I'm doing it in real estate, there's very specific things we're looking for. You're looking for very specific things in businesses and SaaS models. What are the things that you're looking for when you're looking for a business and they come to you and they're like, hey, I used to make 30, I'm now worth one.
How do you know that that one that has now one 30th of the valuation, how do you know that it's actually going to be valuable and that you can monetize it?
So basically, the most important things are the unit economics. A lot of people are underestimating this. How much my software costs until the user can use it is a really important metric. And no one has this on, yeah, overview this number, basically. So how big is my overhead? Did I have another Alpex cost?
What are actually my monthly average costs that I have to provide the services is the most important thing. If I know I do 50k in revenue and I pay only 10k in OPEX and overhead and whatever, I know that I have 40k balance or basically gross profit. And I just need to pay taxes and other stuff. But I know my business is healthy, right?
So if you don't have a control about your economics and I see your P&L and I see that you're just spending like 35%, 50%, 60% in overhead, that's a big no-no for us. Yeah. We're just looking for smart, lean, clean setups that are not too complicated to dive in. Because once we dive in and make it bigger, I mean, you know how it is.
If you just scale a business, it's getting so freaking complicated. And yeah, you don't need this from the beginning.
So when you go in and if they're this lean and they've optimized this and they've done their job really, really well, Why do you think they're not making the profits? Why do you think they can't scale? What is their issue that they run into? If they've already built a system, then it's leading them to have the software that's operational. Where are they failing?
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