Meet the company: Olsam (a UK based Amazon FBA Acquirer)

Share The Knowledge

The past year has been a turbulent time for many marketplace businesses – some have been busier than ever whilst others have seen their sales plummet during the never ending stream of pandemic lock downs. Now at the start of 2021, it’s time to review your business and decide where you want to take it in the future. Today we’re delighted to introduce Sam and Ollie from Olsam who can support you with one type of exit strategy.

For some a marketplace business is a lifestyle income, others will be looking to grow a business either to eventually go public or to sell and cash out. For some who have been running businesses before Tamebay started 16 years ago, you may be thinking about retirement and whether to close your business down, scale down slowly or sell it as a going concern.

If you hit the magic formula for success your business can grow exponentially and there comes a time when you have to decide whether to cap sales or to expand into bigger premises, invest in more staff and grow. If you’re ready to sell that’s where Olsam come in as they are acquiring successful Amazon businesses with a view to investing capital and operational expertise to continue your brand’s growth journey. We asked Sam and Ollie to tell us more:

Who are Olsam?

Olsam was founded by two brothers, Ollie and Sam. Sam worked at Amazon HQ in London in their marketplace team managing hundreds of UK and EU Seller businesses and has started, scaled and sold his own category leading Amazon FBA brand. Ollie began his career in M&A at an investment bank before gaining his professional accountancy qualification at Deloitte.

What do Olsam do?

We are a cash buyer of highly rated Amazon private label brands,. Through our structured 6-week process, we perform due diligence on your business, structure a fair cash deal and migrate your assets (website domain, software tools etc) to Olsam’s ownership. We then focus on scaling your brand to new heights with capital investment and ex-Amazon brand operations and supply chain expertise. We work closely with Sellers to structure deals that work for them, exiting the business entirely with a lump sum cash payment or staying on for a period to share in the upside together. The choice is yours.

Why would someone want to sell their business to Olsam?

Everyone has different personal circumstances. Usually, reasons centre around wanting to free-up hard earned cash for another project, approaching retirement, the business has outgrown you and you need a helping hand to take it to the next level or it’s just become a headache and you’ve fallen out of love with it.

In March, there are potentially significant changes to capital gains tax (Entrepreneurs Relief) and with COVID offering bumper sales, we think there has never been a better time to discuss the sale of your brand.

What makes us unique is our ex-Amazon heritage and our experience starting, scaling and selling our own category leading brand with thousands of positive customer reviews. We’ve managed hundreds of Amazon FBA businesses across a variety of categories and have a finely tuned playbook to operate and scale brands successfully.

We offer a fair, fast and friendly process to anyone seeking to sell their business – we aim to be the type of buyer we wish we’d sold our own FBA business to.

What makes a great business for acquisition?

Buyers have different acquisition criteria, but at Olsam we love brands where there is room for growth, either through new market launches, new SKUs or even developing your own website. We particularly love brands that have fantastic customer reviews as well as a high keyword ranking and organic searchability. We definitely love businesses with a core focus and strong brand identity

How do you value a business?

Businesses are valued by applying a multiple (typically 1.5x-3.5x) to your ‘Seller Discretionary Earnings’; your net profit including director’s salaries.

The key things we look at here are yearly revenue growth (20%+ YoY), SDE margin (20%+) and yearly revenues (£0.5M+).

From an Amazon perspective, we love brands with a high organic sales ranking, clear brand identity (trademarked and A+ content) and great product reviews (ideally 4.5* and above). You don’t necessarily need to have all of these though!