The ABC of Getting Rich - Companies for sale, bargains on gold mines! - Part 2/2

Day 725, 23:11 Published in USA South Korea by Master Of Brutality


First of all: a big thank you to all my subscribers, yesterday I got the Media Mogul award!

This article is a part of "The ABC of Getting Rich" article series. The articles so far in the series:

Prologue
Monetary market, part 1/2
Monetary market, part 2/2
Loans and selling houses
Reselling companies, part 1/2

The previous article dealt with the basics of buying and selling companies. This part, we continue the list of things affecting to the value of the company and go through some practical tips.

The value of the company can be estimated by five factors, two of which were gone through and the third one was begun:
-Quality
-Licenses
-Country and region

With the following things still go through:
-Raw materials and finished products
-The number of employees, both living and dead and their skills and wellness levels

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Countries and their special features.
-The population of the country is a very deciding factor. If it's low, the selling prices of companies are low. For instance in Mexico, there was a Q4 weapons company at 140g looking for a buyer for many months. If there's no workforce, the company is practically useless. In more populous countries you can find buyers even for land companies founded in regions without resources, if the price is right.


If there are no people willing to work or buy products, who would want to buy a company there?

-Taxation is obviously a factor as well. E.g. in Theocratic South Korea, the government controls everything with a super high taxation, so running a company there is usually completely hopeless. Therefore the prices of companies can be very low.

-During conquests, it's possible to get licenses with a cheap price - 5g. However, they're usually worthless due to an open war. In obvious region swaps they may be of some use, e.g. when Canada and USA swapped regions. In this case, instead of browsing through Companies for sale, check the rankings of companies - there you can filter those companies that have been founded in the region in question.

Products and raw materials in the company should of course be taken into account.
-Especially in articles and forum posts, the company owner boasts about products or raw materials worth of some gold. Don't trust these calculations off the bat - instead, go to ErepTools, check the lowest price of the resources and products and do your own calculations based on these. You should also take into account that the real value is not the same as retail value. As a rule of thumb, a viable retail price for raw materials within the company is something between 50-75% of the market value. As for finished products, you can always check the lowest prices in that particular country and sell them yourself.


Check the stores carefully. Products may be for sale as well.

-Don't believe promises about money already within the company. There's no way you can verify it and doing a contract for this is usually a waste of time - the other party might as well take the money from the company and sell it to you for a cheaper price. However, go ahead and ask if that's possible - asking doesn't cost anything. There may be money to keep the company running, but if you manage to schedule a time with the owner to buy the company, he may withdraw the money and sell it at a lower price without losing the employees.

-As a small curiosity, I found a cheap Q1 hospital company. Usually it wouldn't have been worth buying it, but I checked the current law proposals of that particular country... and of course, the congress of that country was buying a hospital from that company and the price was exactly what the owner of the company was asking, so I practically got the company for free. I was obviously very lucky, but diligence is the mother of good luck. The opportunities are there, you just have to find the.

Don't underestimate the value of employees - if the company is profitable.

-If the company still has raw materials and employees, consider the possibility to keep the company up and running for a day or two and sell the products before reselling the company. This way you can usually get more profit. The employees in the company at the time of buying are also valuable, because you don't have to recruit new people. If you've never run a company, this is a prime opportunity to get acquinted - especially if you found a good company. For calculations on profitability, use e.g. this tool, or create your own spreadsheet (worth doing, useful in the future!).


Do calculations whether it's more profitable to keep it running for a while, or if it's better to sell the company straight away.
-If the company has a lot of high skill workers who have worked recently, there's a chance the company accounts have some money. Not necessarily a lot, but possibly the wages of 1-2 days. Don't get too enthusiastic if you see a company with a lot of employees: a lot of company owners tend to recruit the company full of cheap labor before selling it to make it seem like the company is running. Say no to 10 skill 2 employees with 40 wellness.
-Dead employees are valuable, because they raise the production multipliers with a small number of real employees.

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Tips

-If you have enough wealth, get two organizations. With one organization, you can only have one of each company types: if you already have one, you can't buy one being sold at a ridiculous price.

-Always have 2 moving tickets and depending on your wealth, for instance 20-40g gold ready on your organization. This way you're always ready to move to any country to buy a company, no matter where you are. If you need to move money from one account to another, you may miss the deal.

-Go through the Companies for sale list systematically and often. Browse the list one country at a time, starting with the cheap ones and stopping when you can't afford the companies anymore. A good method is to first go through the first couple of pages for very good offers, then go through the interesting industries with a closer look. If the country doesn't have high raw materials, it's of no use going them through - you can concentrate on manufacturing companies. Don't always start with the same country, because you're probably more concentrated when you haven't gone through 30 countries already.


Pay attention to every detail!

-If you don't have enough money alone, it's very likely your friends might be interested in making money: split the profit with the "investors". It's not a good idea to ask in public whether someone wants to buy a particular company with you, so that no one will buy it before you can. Ask in private. I, for one, am usually ready to get into good deals, if I see potential in them 😉

-The longer you do company reselling, the more likely you'll companies that have been set for sale "accidentally" and accidentally at a too low price. In some cases the companies have been set for sale by uninvited guests on the owning organization. In these three cases, the owners usually try to get their companies back - act according to your conscience. You haven't done anything wrong, since you're acting in good faith. Sometimes it's best to get more friends by giving back the company, sometimes you can ask for a small fee, sometimes you can just keep the company yourself. If the company you bought is owned by an ally, you'd do well to cut them some slack.

-You can always ask for a discount from the company owner. There may well be some extra in the price. However, it's yet another thing whether you can actually get the company sold further for a higher price. Asking for ridiculous discounts makes you look silly - it's an entirely different thing to say you're willing to pay x gold of the company than to claim the company to be a lot less worth than what the owner is asking. With a bad first impression you may well ruin the deal.

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Conclusion

The company retail value can be learnt rather quickly by browsing the companies for sale - after a couple of times you'll remember companies that haven't been sold. This way you can create an image of the companies that have been overpriced.

The ways to profit so far in previous articles have different requirements from the player - monetary market needs time, house market and loans need contacts, company reselling on the other hand needs diligence and a systematic approach. There are pretty much always good companies for sale, but the difficult thing is to find them before everyone else.

In the next article, we'll get into running a company. Perhaps someone finds a good company even before that!