Bawar Ahmad has bought around 70 ecommerce businesses in six years, and the first thing he does after the money clears isn't marketing. It's ringing the vendors. SummaryBawar Ahmad co-founded Ecomma, a Dubai-based micro private equity firm that buys, scales and sells Shopify businesses. Around 70 acquisitions and 60 exits later, with a team of 40 and a target of 30 to 36 more acquisitions this year, he has turned what most people treat as a once-in-a-lifetime event into a repeatable system. He walks Matt through the 12 to 15 "value drivers" his team runs on every store they acquire, why valuation comes down to just two things, and the mistake that quietly costs sellers a chunk of their exit. He also explains how Ecomma gets from first questionnaire to cash in the seller's bank in 14 to 20 days when the industry standard is three to four months. Matt, who has bought and sold ecommerce businesses on very different terms, pushes him on the other side of the coin, which is growth by acquisition. If you're turning over a million and want to get to five, should you double from scratch or go and buy someone? 00:00 — Welcome, and two ecommerce dinosaurs meet03:22 — Seventy acquisitions in six years06:11 — The first deal, a declining shoe brand bought before Black Friday10:04 — What happens in a seller's head once they decide to sell12:28 — Choosing an advisor, and the clean-financials red flag16:02 — Normalisation, SDE and the tax conundrum17:51 — Fourteen days from questionnaire to cash in the bank20:09 — Asset purchase or share transfer on sub-$2m deals24:06 — Profit, risk, and the value drivers that run on day one29:11 — Voice marketing as the third retention channel32:48 — Where to start if you want to buy a business35:25 — Due diligence is for understanding, not just verifying38:32 — When the brand is built entirely around the founder41:09 — Buy for the audience, not the niche46:52 — Structuring a deal when you buy a competitor50:31 — What Ecomma buys, and the free exit-prep checklist53:22 — Saving the best till last, get your data room ready (Chapter markers aligned to the episode video.) The Day-One Phone Calls That Move the Numbers (24:06)Valuation comes down to two things in Bawar's model, profit and risk. Ecomma either grows one or removes the other, and about 20% of the time they add value without touching profit at all — building a team, adding backup suppliers, getting better contracts in place, removing the dependencies a buyer would discount for. The rest is a standardised playbook of 12 to 15 value drivers, and the first one he gives away is negotiating costs down. On day one, the team rings every vendor on the account. The Klaviyo bill, the PayPal transaction fee, the supplier, the 3PL. Then they ask for better pricing. "You'll be surprised how much of the vendors were like, we're waiting for this call for some time." — Bawar AhmadHe reckons that alone moves profit by roughly 20% almost overnight. On the payments line specifically, his framing is blunt. "So on PayPal, we've added 20% of valuation on the first day." — Bawar AhmadThe next two drivers are marketing ones. Creative volume. If a brand is shipping 8 new videos a month on Facebook, Ecomma pushes it to 20 or 30 and expects ROAS to follow.Untapped retention channels. SMS flows and campaigns get switched on, then voice. Stack enough of those small percentages and, in his words, before you know it you've doubled the business in 90 days. His stated average across the portfolio is a 150% uplift in 90 days. Don't Assume the Sale (10:04)Bawar says he sees the same sequence in about 90% of sellers. Life changes, they Google whether they can sell, they land on a valuation form promising a big number, they list, and the interest floods in. Then, 30 or 50 conversations later, the buyers go cold and the seller starts drifting away from the business. That's where the damage happens. New creative doesn't get made. The influencer deal gets shelved. Inventory doesn't get reordered. Performance dips, and buyers can read a declining chart as well as anyone. "You don't want to run the business as you're gonna sell it." — Bawar AhmadThe example he gives is illustrative rather than measured, but the shape of it holds. A business doing $100,000 profit a year at a 3x multiple is a $300,000 exit. Let performance slide during the sale process and that same business might fetch $150,000. Two or three more months of running it properly is, on his maths, worth the difference. Clean Financials Beat a Good Pitch (12:28)Bawar's third seller mistake is the one he came back to at the end of the episode when Matt asked for the best advice he hadn't yet given. Plenty of brands doing millions a year are still run on Google Sheets, with the car lease and the Uber Eats going through the same entity as the stock. "It's just a red flag." — Bawar AhmadBuyers at this level often aren't ecommerce natives, so messy books make a business hard to underwrite and easy to walk away from. His fix starts at least a full financial year before you go to market. Separate every personal cost out of the businessGet a proper P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting in placeKeep the bookkeeping current and the invoices tidyHave the SOPs, systems and team documented alongside the numbers Matt raised the obvious British objection, which is that a limited company owner legitimately puts as much through the business as possible to reduce their tax bill, and in doing so reduces the profit their valuation is built on. Bawar's answer is normalisation. Costs that are genuinely personal get added back as seller discretionary earnings, or SDE, and the valuation reflects the real economics — but that only works if the books are clean enough to prove it. "You have to start thinking as an asset. This is a business, this is a system, it's not a lifestyle business." — Bawar AhmadThe preparation argument runs into deal speed too. Both of them have a phrase for it. "Time kills deals." — Bawar Ahmad"Deals are like concrete — the longer you leave them, the harder they get." — Matt EdmundsonThat's what the data room is for. If a buyer asks a question and the answer takes three or four days to dig out, the deal cools. If the answer takes five minutes, it doesn't. Fourteen Days, Not Four Months (17:51)From the moment a seller returns Ecomma's questionnaire to cash hitting their bank is 14 to 20 days on average. An offer goes out within 24 hours of getting access, due diligence takes seven days, contracts add a couple more, then handover. Bawar is clear that this isn't standard. A normal go-to-market process runs three to four months, and Matt's own exits have taken six. The gap exists because most buyers don't understand ecommerce well enough to move quickly, so they compensate with time and paperwork. Knowing the model means knowing which checks actually matter. One structural note for anyone selling. Around 99% of deals below $2m are asset purchases rather than share transfers, so the buyer takes the assets and leaves the entity, its contracts and its history behind. Matt's caveat is that the tax treatment differs between the two, so talk to your accountant before you decide. The Third Retention Channel (29:11)Almost every Shopify store has an abandoned-cart email flow. A smaller number have SMS. Bawar's argument is that voice AI is arriving as the third one, and that 95% of brands haven't turned it on. The mechanic is straightforward. Someone adds to cart and leaves, and roughly ten minutes later an AI agent phones them. It might be one in the afternoon, it might be one in the morning. "These agents, the softwares never sleep." — Bawar AhmadThe agent asks what they were looking for, hears the answer, and offers the discount code. Ecomma sees it add around 5% to revenue. The side benefit is the recordings, because you get to hear a mother buying a toy for a ten-year-old explain in her own words why she was on the site, which is intelligence that paid ads and email don't give you. He expects it to be as ordinary as email within three years. Matt's gentler on-ramp for anyone nervous about letting AI talk to their customers is the voice memo, sent over SMS or WhatsApp, recorded by an actual human on the team. Buying a Business to Grow Your Own (41:09)For an operator doing a million a year who wants to get to five, acquisition is the other route. Bawar's filter for what to buy is not the product category. "I would just go with audience first." — Bawar AhmadA skincare brand serving 35-year-old women with acne shouldn't buy a phone case company for the extra revenue, and shouldn't buy a mascara brand either, because that's a different customer wearing the same label. It should buy the supplement brand those same women are already asking about, and build around the audience rather than the niche. Matt's live example is a vegan supplement business whose customers keep asking for two things, electrolytes and protein. The electrolytes are developed. Protein quotes from manufacturers came back in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to get started, which makes buying or merging with an existing vegan protein brand the live question. Three things Bawar would tell a first-time...
