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In our last post, we shared some big news. We bought a business!
Buying a business is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I was excited when we found one in our wheelhouse (or at least I hope it’s in our wheelhouse).
We’re currently 30 days into our business acquisition, so I thought it would be fun to time to share an update on how things are going so far.
But first, here’s some context if you didn’t read our last post:
We bought a five-year-old blog called RV Inspiration from our friend Ashley. RV Inspiration is a site focused on helping people make their RVs feel like home, featuring advice and tips on interior design, how to paint your RV, and much more.
As part of the acquisition, we also purchased RenovatedRVsforSale.com, a marketplace for buying and selling renovated RVs.
When Ashley told us she was thinking of selling her site I immediately became excited. I’ve followed her journey for years and loved the community and content she created.
Why I’m sharing our journey acquisition journey:
Our goal for HeathandAlyssa.com has always been to share what we learn while chasing after our goals. Sometimes those goals are travel related, like going to all fifty states, or business-related, like growing Campground Booking.
And in line with how we’ve tried to share the highs and lows, I’ll share monthly updates on what we’re learning with RV Inspiration, how it’s going, and what we’re actively doing to grow this new business we’ve purchased.
As part of sharing this update, I decided to be open and share some of the actual numbers (revenue, KPIs, etc) from running the site. Yes, real numbers. I feel it helps provide context to anyone who might be interested in buying a business of their own.
Okay, let’s get into it!
What Went Well During Our First 30 Days
Transitioning of software subscriptions, tools, affiliate programs, and payout methods.
AKA a WHOLE lot of admin work.
Below is a screenshot of the Google sheet we used during the process of updating software and services.
The first two weeks of owning the business required a lot more administrative work than I would have thought. Two full weeks.
We spent a considerable amount of time going through and updating all of the tools Ashley was using to be under our name and billing info. While it wasn’t hard work, it took a lot of time. Sometimes we would log in to a new software only to realize we needed to email the company to manually make changes for us. Then wait for their replies, then get everything updated and verified, which took days.
One of the things you’ll run into when you sell or buy a business is the transition of all the software tools you are using.
Some software subscriptions won’t actually transfer one owner’s account to another person. Therefore, you have to create a new account. For instance, Ashley was using Ezoic to power the (limited) ads on the marketplace site and we have to create a new account versus taking over her account.
I don’t know that I would say this went “well”, but we accomplished what we needed to do for the most part. We’re a month in and still trying to figure out a few updates, like how to update tax information without it affecting who companies send the proper 2022 1099s to. While it’s not the most exciting part of buying a new business, it’s something that is required.
Note: This transition of software and tools will vary based on different acquisition deals. When we sold Campground Booking to Camping World, it took months for everything to finally be transferred out of our name and into theirs (especially email servers). Part of the reason for this was simply that it wasn’t as much of a priority in a big company. It’s more important to focus on core business strategy and operations versus spending a full day on fixing all the $10/month software subscriptions. In the case of buying RV Inspiration, we all felt it would be best to transition these tools before the end of the year and have a clean start to 2023.
Making money from day one.
Being able to make money on day one from a business is amazing.
Even though we were mostly in the weeds of transferring software and accounts, the business was still doing its thing.
Contrast this to our experience buying commercial real estate last year. We bought our campground property and immediately saw money leaving our bank account versus entering it. With RV Inspiration, we were taking in both advertising revenue as well as new listings in our marketplace as soon as we closed.
A few other wins I’d add:
- Started experimenting with reels on Instagram. While only made two of them, they reached over 70K and will be something we will keep utilizing to grow our Instagram reach.
- I posted my first blog on the site, featuring an interview with my friend Andy from Bus Life NZ.
- Made site experience improvements to the home page on RV Inspiration (and also learned that shortening our sidebar can increase ad revenue, making it something specific we focused on improving!)
What Didn’t Go Well During the First 30 Days
Content creation.
We barely made any new content. Just my one blog post really.
As a content site, this is bad.
Alyssa and I took off a couple of weeks around the holidays and spent most of the first two weeks transitioning the business over to us. Moving forward this is a key focus. Our plan is to post 1-2 new blogs per week.
Revenue.
Ad revenue and Amazon associates both dipped in December. Apparently, this time of year it’s common for ad revenue to go down. However, December should have been a peak month for buying through Amazon affiliates and it wasn’t for us. Yes, we still made money, but it was lower than average for the rest of 2022.
December Numbers at a Glance
Total revenue (both sites): $3,851.19
New listings created on the marketplace: 10 (our goal is to eventually get to one new listing per day)
Total live listings: 24 (we want WAY more than this)
December 2022 Revenue Breakdown
- AdThrive revenue: $1,989
- Marketplace revenue: $841.00
- Amazon Associates: $760.11
- Other revenue (affiliates, Gumroad): $261.19
Total revenue in December: $3,851.19
December 2022 Web Traffic
RenovatedRVsforSale.com: 55,183 page views
RVing is a seasonal business, so naturally more people search for units in the summer. However, we actually had a little bit of a spike in traffic in December whereas last December was the lowest month of the year.
I’m not entirely sure what caused the spike in December traffic. I did run a few promoted posts on some of our listings, but either way, it’s a welcome spike.
RV Inspiration: 67,850 page views
While slightly more traffic than in the marketplace, the overall trend is definitely going down. We will need to hustle to get this site moving in an upward trajectory from a visitor perspective.
ROI Calculation
We purchased RV Inspiration for $100K.
Our goal is a two-year payback while still investing in the business to grow, which would be equal to ~$4,000/month in profit.
Our expenses are not high, but we do have costs. We don’t have a good picture of our complete expenses yet (will share in the future) since we are still in the process of figuring out which softwares/plugins are worth keeping, hiring writers, working with a VA, etc.).
I don’t yet know the breakdown of what we’ll allocate towards our return versus reinvesting into content, new website, etc. Especially in these early months, we’ll be reinvesting profits toward updating our websites and hiring a team of writers.
However, for this first month, I feel confident in saying we could set aside $1,000 in profit that would count towards our overall return (and reinvest the $2,800 into the business).
Looking Ahead
We have a few areas we are focusing our attention on moving forward with RV Inspiration.
1. Google Discovery.
In talking with my friend Andy who owns multiple content sites, this is where we should be investing the majority of our time and energy.
I’m still learning about Google Discovery, but to my understanding, it’s effectively Google’s algorithm that promotes specific articles to users that they’ll likely be interested in. Our current traffic coming from Google discover is only about 5%, but I’d like to increase this.
In order to do so, we’re working on a handful of recommended strategies for getting featured in Google Discover (better featured images, better titles, etc).
2. Hiring writers and an editor so we can consistently publish awesome content.
Last month we only published one new article and we need to be posting at least one per week (if not more).
3. Relaunch of our Renovated RV Marketplace site.
This likely won’t happen until later in Q1, but right now there are a lot of manual tasks tied to this site that I’d like to improve. A fresh new marketplace to easily list renovated RVs is something I’m excited about.
Key Takeaways
This first month has felt a mixture of excitement and overwhelm. There are a lot of things to do and I’ve ended each day feeling like I didn’t quite make as much progress as I would like. (Most of this feeling I know is from spending two weeks on the transitional progress followed by Christmas and New Year’s. Definitely would NOT recommend buying a new business right before the craziness of the holidays!)
It’s felt like a bigger push of my comfort zone than I’d have thought too. I assumed because Alyssa and I had blogged for years that we’d be stepping into a pretty familiar world.
However, I realize that we’ve blogged out of passion, and not really for a business. I’ve never tracked RPM trends or spent much time analyzing keywords. I just wrote articles that I wanted to write.
I feel optimistic and excited to keep learning and growing with this new business.
If you made it this far in the article, I’d love to hear from you in a comment below. Was this an interesting recap? What else should I share?
