In this Throwback episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews serial entrepreneur Roland Frasier on scaling ecommerce businesses from seven to eight figures and beyond. Roland shares actionable strategies around business acquisitions, including seven key categories: competitors, media, teams, products, affiliates, supply chain, and intellectual property. He explains how acquiring proven assets—rather than building from scratch—can accelerate growth, reduce costs, and expand market reach. The conversation also covers practical tips on systematizing operations and quick profit wins, providing high-level insights for ambitious business owners ready to break through growth plateaus.
Chapters:
Introduction to the Episode (00:00:00)
Host introduces Roland Frazier and outlines the focus on acquisitions, strategic relationships, and marketing for scaling ecommerce.
Why Acquisitions Matter (00:00:54)
Roland explains why acquisitions are a key strategy for successful business growth, especially for scaling quickly.
Seven Categories of Acquisitions: Horizontal Integration (00:01:05)
Discussion of acquiring competitors (horizontal integration) as a way to double business size instantly.
Acquiring Media Assets (00:02:09)
Explains the value of acquiring media channels (blogs, newsletters, podcasts, social groups) to own customer attention.
Owning vs. Renting Media (00:03:16)
Benefits of owning media versus renting, including control over messaging and customer access.
Types of Media Acquisitions (00:04:17)
Covers various media types to acquire, including blogs, Amazon listings, and social media groups.
Micro-Influencers and Small Media Deals (00:06:26)
How small media assets, often run by micro-influencers, can be acquired affordably for business growth.
Acquiring Teams and Infrastructure (00:07:15)
Introduction to “aqua hiring”—acquiring companies for their teams and operational infrastructure.
Acquiring Products, Services, and Affiliates (00:07:32)
Strategies for acquiring complementary products, services, and even affiliates to boost sales and margins.
Supply Chain and Distribution Acquisitions (00:08:28)
Explains acquiring suppliers, distributors, and other value chain participants to capture more profit.
Acquiring Intellectual Property (00:10:15)
Discusses licensing or acquiring intellectual property to innovate and expand product offerings.
Summary of Seven Acquisition Categories (00:10:27)
Roland summarizes the seven main acquisition categories and the vast opportunities within each.
Actionable Takeaways for Listeners (00:12:01)
Host recaps three actionable steps: identify acquisition targets, raise prices/negotiate terms, and create SOPs.
Book Recommendation: Black Box Thinking (00:13:34)
Roland recommends “Black Box Thinking” and shares its impact on his business mindset.
Where to Find Roland Frazier (00:14:51)
Roland shares where listeners can connect with him, his challenge, podcast, and social media.
Episode Wrap-Up (00:15:25)
Host thanks Roland and closes the episode.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Websites
Get Epic Challenge
Epic Network
Business Lunch Podcast
Books
Black Box Thinking
Social Media Links
Roland Fraiser on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Josh Hadley 00:00:00 Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast where I interview the top business leaders in eCommerce. I’m your host, Josh Hadley. Today I’m speaking with Roland Frasier, a serial entrepreneur. And we will be talking about business acquisitions, strategic relationships and marketing as different levers that you can pull to help take your business to the next level for our audience. So ecommerce entrepreneurs here. Ideally, in that seven figure range, they’ve probably just crossed that seven figure mark. Right. And they may or may not have hit a plateau. Right. But they know that they want to make a lasting impact in the world. They know that their business has a lot of potential, but maybe they don’t know exactly what the next steps are, or they’re looking for different levers that they can pull to maybe get to that eight figure mark or grow and expand. tell me how acquisitions fit with inside of, you know, being able to scale and grow a business.
Roland Frasier 00:00:54 Yeah. So I think acquisitions are if you look at what do the wealthiest, most successful players on the planet do? They acquire companies.
Roland Frasier 00:01:05 They generally are not inventing things. They are finding people who have done something that they feel could enhance their business, and then they’re acquiring from those people. Whatever it is they built. And what one of the tools that that kind of came out of teaching this is that I found there’s really seven primary categories that can dramatically impact your ability to grow your business through acquisitions. The first one is what they call horizontal, integration, which is just acquiring your competitors. And that one seems like that one makes a lot of sense. But it’s not just buying your competitors because like, if you want to double your e-com business overnight, you and you’re doing $5 million a year, go buy a $5 million e-commerce business, and you’ve instantly gone from 7 to 8 figures. Right now you’re at ten. Yep. literally overnight, the day that you close the deal that’s done. And being able to do that with little or no money out of pocket opens that avenue up, I think, to a lot more people.
Roland Frasier 00:02:09 But it’s not just acquire your competitors. It’s well, who are the indirect competitors? Like who are the people that have substitute products or services for mine? And then you think you can go out and say, well, now what is it that I want to solve for problem wise? And so if you want to, if you want instant growth by your competitors, right. But if you want, let’s say that you’re just like, man, if I had more leads, I’d be able to really take off with this. Well then media is your play. Go acquire media. If you acquire media, particularly as the costs on Facebook and Instagram and a lot of places Google have gone up and are continuing to go up, like customer acquisition cost is a real challenge for a lot of people these days. But if you go out and acquire your own media and that can be, it doesn’t have to be like you go buy a television network. It can be. You go and buy a newsletter or a group or a podcast or some other thing that people have put together that has attracted and aggregated the attention and eyeballs of the people that you want to sell to, then that’s a tremendously valuable acquisition, because now you do two things.
Roland Frasier 00:03:16 You’re no longer renting. You own the media. You’re not renting it from somebody that can decide. Then maybe you’re selling something that they don’t like. Like you’re selling, you know, supplements or something like that, that they’re that the, the, you know, the fang, people don’t like.
Josh Hadley 00:03:33 Right.
Roland Frasier 00:03:33 Yeah. So, you know, or maybe you’re messaging is politically oriented and they don’t like that, you know. Well, if you own your media, you can do whatever the heck you want to do. And nobody can stop you from doing it. Nobody can stop you from buying it. Nobody can outbid you for it because you own it. So that becomes tremendously valuable, Right.
Josh Hadley 00:03:53 And I think in e-commerce especially. Right. I think you have blogs, right. I mean, think of how many people make affiliate income just off of running blogs or review sites or deal sites. Right. Those are those are some easy targets, right? And like you mentioned, Facebook groups and even Instagram pages and TikTok, you know, is becoming even more of a thing.
Josh Hadley 00:04:15 Anything else you would add to that?
Roland Frasier 00:04:17 Well, obviously meetup groups, masterminds, any I mean, and there are radio, television and, print, properties that are available magazines. You’d be amazed. Like, I mean, we were looking at buying, it was a Condé Nast owned property, but, but, like, we’ve looked at, at major magazines that can be acquired for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy or out of just a desire to dump them during acquisitions. there are all kinds of media that are out there. So I would just say, like, you’re only limited like media is any asset that comes with people, right? Yeah. So like there is like a form of media is an Amazon listing because an Amazon listing that ranks well in the Amazon engine for search actually carries with it a whole bunch of reviews. That’s a bunch of people that have already been aggregated and proven as buyers. And now Amazon just opened up, I think, this week to being able to reach out and email your customers, including your past customers.
Roland Frasier 00:05:22 So like, you know, hey, newsflash, if you acquire that Amazon account or that Amazon product that’s got those people that’s attached to it, you just got an email list.
Josh Hadley 00:05:33 Now, that’s very true. Yeah, I didn’t think about that. That’s true.
Roland Frasier 00:05:37 Yeah. So like that all that stuff to me is, is is really interesting that that, all of these things have like, the SEO blogs, you know, blogs and URLs that rank videos that rank, and you can acquire the specific asset, the specific page. You can acquire, the whole site, the whole channel, you can acquire the whole account. And you get all of these benefits each time you go up a level. So like media is almost infinite. That’s out there and you’re only limited by your own creativity and identifying what is it and and like really diving in and like that’s just a channel. And that channel has, you know, so many or that’s one of of the categories I guess I should say media is a category, but there are literally hundreds of types of it.
Roland Frasier 00:06:26 And then under that, millions of potential acquisitions for, for anybody and media sells typically for not much unless it’s like if it’s a syndicated TV show with hundreds of millions of viewers, okay, that’s going to sell for a lot. But so much media is created through micro influencers and things like that, where it’s just a labor of love that turned out to be something that’s probably now a pain in the butt because, like, it’s after they’ve run it for 3 or 4 years. Like, I gotta keep doing stuff for this long. We’re not getting paid for it. You come in with an offer for any little tiny bit of money. They’re pretty excited about that.
Josh Hadley 00:07:02 That’s that’s awesome. I mean, so many golden nuggets out of there. And we could continue diving down that rabbit hole. And that’s only one of the two verticals that you kind of talked about, right? Yeah. You said you have kind of seven different categories. Right.
Roland Frasier 00:07:15 Yeah. So so if I go around the list, the next one would be how how can I get teams and infrastructure? A lot of people are will say, well, I need a, I need a media buyer and I don’t know where to find one or I need a inventory management or I’ve got to have a, you know, a three PL team to do this stuff.
Roland Frasier 00:07:32 And I have no idea how to do that. I’ve never done that before. Well, those teams all exist, as do all of the other resources that you might need, and there’s a good chance that you can acquire them. As a matter of fact, from from somebody that’s already done it. As a matter of fact, they have a term for the teams. They call it aqua hiring, where you acquire a business or a business division or a business unit, and you get the team and then you have a team instantly. And we’ve done that with software and R&D and a whole bunch of sales, you know. Then another category would be products and services. So if you look at what are the products and services that your people who you’re selling to are buying, particularly BDA, before, during and after the time that they’re buying from you, go buy those products, you instantly can add a whole lot more sales, increase your average order value, add upsells and down sells. Just by doing that, you can also go and acquire up and down the supply and distribution chain.
Roland Frasier 00:08:28 You mentioned affiliates. So many people forget that they can actually acquire their affiliates. So they’re paying them 30, 40, 50, 60% of the gross sales price and never even think, well, what if I just acquired that mummy blog? Or what if I just acquired that newsletter or, you know. I mean, and that’s a huge one. Like, I’ve got people that have acquired, people that they were paying $1 million plus a year to, and they were able to acquire them for less than one year payments that they were making to them.
Josh Hadley 00:09:00 Oh that’s amazing. Crazy, right?
Roland Frasier 00:09:02 So, you know, so that’s a really cool. you know, that’s a cool distribution thing because a lot of people are like, well, you know, and e-commerce, it’s easier. But, you know, a lot of people will say, well, I don’t really have distribution. I’m DTC. Well, you might be DTC, but are you direct to customer because you’re selling to them from your website? Or are you direct customer because you’re selling to them through your website, but you also have affiliates that you’re paying to send people to your website so you can sell direct customer.
Roland Frasier 00:09:28 That’s all that’s considered an affiliate relationship, right? You’re yeah, you’ve got a lot of options there. and then up to your supplier’s your component, or ingredient providers, all of those your formulas, those are all people who are taking a slice of the profit out of the overall value chain for this thing that you’re ultimately selling. So all of the people that are taking their piece of the value chain profit above you or are beneath you are great places to consider acquiring. And then, intellectual property would be another one. You know, if you, if you watch Shark Tank or Dragons Den or any of those things, you’ll all the time see people saying, you know, the sharks especially, they’re like, why don’t we just take that to this company that already does that and get a royalty for doing it?
Josh Hadley 00:10:15 Yep. License it out. Yep.
Roland Frasier 00:10:17 Right. You can do that too. You can be a licensor or a licensee. So maybe you don’t want to acquire the intellectual property because you can’t afford it or it’s not for sale.
Roland Frasier 00:10:27 But if you could get a decent license deal, you you are acquiring the right to use that property, which then gives you innovation baked into everything that you can offer new stuff to all the people that already bought from you before. So a lot of people are just dying to buy more from you, but they bought everything you’ve got. If you want to find something else, you need to go out and find products, find services, or go up and down the supply and distribution chain or get IP to do that. And so like all of those things. So that’s basically by your competitors by the media acquire the teams and resources. Get products and services. get recurring revenue assets. so anything that’s being sold on a recurring revenue that you could add to yours. get your, intellectual property. And I think I said supply and distribution. So, like, it’s, I mean, oh, my gosh, there’s really so across those seven categories, then let’s say you could only identify ten subcategories. You’d be at 70.
Roland Frasier 00:11:28 And we’ve identified a lot more than that. And then let’s say that you identified ten companies. Under each of those you got 700 potential acquisitions. You can go all, you know, all day long. Yeah. You could. Good. Right. Yeah. So there’s plenty there’s never a lack of potential companies to buy. And because it’s so much easier to acquire a company that’s already got value than it is to create value from nothing. To me, it’s just crazy to think about. I’m going to start something when so many people already have and are so willing to allow you to acquire it for no money out of your pocket.
Josh Hadley 00:12:01 Well, thank you so much, Roland. I’m going to some things up here. I think we have kind of like three actionable takeaways for our audience today. So I think first would be you, you know, determine if you have an acquisition target in mind, right. You mentioned the seven different categories. Identify which of those seven categories you really want to pursue.
Josh Hadley 00:12:21 Where is it? Do you need more leads coming in? Do you need more profit margin. Right. And like Roland said, choose one and then dive into it right. And go, go start reaching out to your network. Acquire a list. Start building a funnel to go acquire some of those assets that can help you take it to your business, to the next level. A second idea if you’re maybe not ready to go acquire businesses. Roland already mentioned one of the quickest ways that he would increase the value or profits in any business that he recently acquires. Go raise prices. Number one, start price testing at least in number two. Go see if there’s some opportunity with your suppliers to negotiate better terms. Then I think finally a third step. No matter where you’re at in your business, I think this is good advice. Start trying to create those SOPs and almost kind of work yourself out of a job. You don’t want to be the one running the show the whole time because as Roland said, your value is going to increase as a business.
Josh Hadley 00:13:20 Your pool of of buyers is going to increase as well. So I think those are some easy three takeaways for any of our listeners. Roland, before we sign off, I know I asked you this earlier, but what is one book that you would recommend?
Roland Frasier 00:13:34 Well, there’s so many. I think one of the books that I got the most out of over the last five years or so, was recommended, by Richard Branson, and it’s called Black Box Thinking. And, it really the black, it comes from the black box that is found when airplanes crash that track the the things that tell the causes and how that open systems that the airlines all share that data with each other and that that the thinking of how they do that really isn’t allowed airline safety to increase to be one of the, you know, one of the most safe means of transportation, even though we’re sitting in this non flyable. It seems, you know hunk of tons of metal in the air. so the the methodology and the stories and the insights that were in that book, I think had a pretty significant impact on my thinking.
Roland Frasier 00:14:30 And I like books that I read and I close it and I’m mad at myself for not having thought of all that stuff before. So that’s one of those books that did that for me.
Josh Hadley 00:14:38 I love it. I’m gonna have to go dive into that book and you’ve got me excited there. last thing rolling. Where should people reach out to you if they’d like to learn more about what you’re doing, learn more about epic, even your books. What you got going on?
Roland Frasier 00:14:51 Sure. So I do a challenge about every month that is a free challenge now, and it’s at Get Epic Challenge, where I talk about how to acquire businesses with little or no money out of pocket. you mentioned Epic Network, which is where a lot of the the products and services around that lay. I’m on I have a podcast, just like you do here. it’s called Business Lunch, where I talk to smart people like you about what they’re doing, and, and then I’m everywhere on social, from TikTok and YouTube to Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn at whatever those things are.
Roland Frasier 00:15:24 Forward slash Roland Frasier.
Josh Hadley 00:15:25 Awesome. I love it. Well, thank you for your time today, Roland. It was a pleasure having you on.
Roland Frasier 00:15:30 Yeah, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
