GSB-02: How To Find and Buy or Lease the Right Gas Station Business

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In this episode let’s talk about how to find a station to buy that fits your budget. How to figure out if a business that you like is making money or not and how to tell if they are and if so how much?

Now let’s dive into today’s topic, first how to find a gas station that is for sale

There are many ways to find gas stations, convenience stores that are for sale in your area.

5 Offline ways are:

You can contact

1. Through Local business brokers (Some national and some local, two of the major national brokerage companies are Sunbelt and Nationwide business brokers, local or statewide would like Gas Station USA brokers in FL)
2. through Local commercial real estate agents
3. through Local newspaper classified
4. through Local oil and fuel Jobbers/wholesaler
5. Through Vendors (this will only work if you are already in this line of business)

Now let’s talk about

5 ways you can find businesses for sale online:

There are some very reputable websites you can go and check for sale listings; then there are also online auction houses that sell gas stations among other businesses.

1. First check out bizbuysell.com, this is the site similar to realtor.com for the home real estate, in this site business brokers list their businesses that are for sale.
2. Then there is NRC.com, is it a more for corporate stores that are for sale, and this site only focuses on gas stations and c stores that are for sale.
3. Craigslist ads yes you can find them under “business for sale.”
4. Do a search for auction house that sells commercial properties
5. You can also just do a google search by typing “gas station for sale in ..then mention your city and state and see what comes up.

I also talk about how you can do a proper and effective due diligence on the business that you want to buy or lease. In order to do a proper due diligence you need to know some number from the business such as:

1. Monthly inside sales or nonfuel sales
2. Monthly fuel sales
3. All the fixed expenses
4. All the variable expenses labor, utility and such
5. Misc expenses like license renewal fee, accounting fees, cleaning or pressure washing, etc
6. COGS of all nonfuel
7. COGS of fuel

* COGS = Cost of Goods Sold

For more information on how to do a proper and thorough due diligence check out the blog post “How to do a thorough Due Diligence on a gas station business”.

Now let’s recap what we talked about today, first I spoke about how to find a gas station for sale, 2nd we touched on if you should buy or lease, the advantages and disadvantages of buying vs. leasing, then I covered how to do due diligence and dig deep into the P&L. How to calculate profit margin and lastly what are the typical product categories in a gas station and what is the average profit margin in those product categories.

The book I mentioned in this episode is called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing By Al Ries and Jack Trout. It is a fantastic read and a great resource for anyone trying to understand marketing. The illustrated examples and strategies are from real companies, so it is a rather inside view of some of the very innovative ways some big companies work their marketing magic. I believe you will enjoy reading this book.

If you have any question, please feel free to ask me and I will try my best to answer them. You can reach me by going to my blog at gassattionbusiness101.com and go to the tab where it says “Ask Me“, you can also reach me via Facebook at Facebook.com/csbacademy, if you rather use Twitter, you can find me at @csb_Academy

I hope you can take away something from each episode and implement in your business and see some positive result.

Once again I want to thank you from bottom of my heart for staying with me, please feel free to contact me with any comments, suggestions or questions you may have as I would love to hear from you.

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Thanks!