Before you start remember if you are using a brokerage site always sign a commission agreement up front. A contract saves on any misunderstanding further down the line.
I will give you an example of one such business later on that refused to sign a commission agreement and told me to keep things under radar as he did not want the publicity only to sing it from the roof tops on a popular business social media platform. This in turn minimised who I could then approach as this person was connected with the majority of my connections. Anyone seeing this would eliminate the middle man or in my case middle woman and deal with him directly. He said he was once offered $350K but he turned it down loosing that opportunity for good and now he is asking £345K for the same business. Sometimes you have to evaluate if it is a good thing to pass up on a high figure due to greed and then have to wait many years for another opportunity to come by.
Looking at his website he claims he has ex amount of members subscription sign ups which is good as an email list and you know what they say “the money is in the list”. However he has never showed me proof of this. He also states he has thousands of visitors coming to his site every month and again I have no proof of this either. I did do a SEO audit report on his site and found many errors. Looking at his site I would not spend more than a hundred dollars on it but obviously it is his domain name that holds the key as well as his email list and his traffic.
So my first thoughts are why did he not sign a commission agreement it was not exclusive to me, he could have still approached other domain brokers. Secondly under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/24/contents any individual or business must perform due diligence for transactions over £1,000 hence this is a red flag to me that he refused to sign the agreement as this would have been the start of a carbon footprint or digital trail, which maybe means he has less favourable motives to not signing a contract.
So my work that I have done for him to date has gone down the pan even though this domain name was unique and has equity which is an advantage.
But for people who fail to be transparent I will not work with them and have told him so in not so many words this morning to a reply to a message he sent me.
At the moment I am still keeping quiet about the domain name and business modal that this person has for sale as I want to see if he replies to me for being sly.
If he did not want to pay a commission then he should not have approached me and just done outbound marketing himself, but due to health reasons he had not this, so what was the change of heart?
24/02/20 Since writing this blog post yesterday the person has come back to me to say he has does not care for due diligence formalities and the reason he posted on “Linkedin” was to test the water. For people who do not want to perform due diligence raises a red flag.
This person says he has over 20 years experience yesterday but today he says he has over 50 years experience is a lie as the internet has not been around that long for the public. He went on to say he has sold domains all over the world well good for him but a law is a law and you cannot argue with a law.
I am not going to promote his domain name or business if he does not want to play ball, I have more to risk than he does and if he does not care about consequences or formalities, a simple word of mouth gentlemen’s agreement will not do. I was going to promote the domain full blast but because of his reluctance to sign an agreement tells me he has something to hide.
I have done gentlemen’s agreements before and have found them to be not solid, so I will not do them now. Trust no one. Why should I trust him?, I do not know him?
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