Karen had finished a career as a police officer when she bought “Building a Website for Dummies” and created an online medical certification business. This is her story of selling that business on Flippa for $225,000.
“I was coming off a career as a police officer and I perceived myself as not having any civilian world skills…” Karen went to Barnes & Noble, Inc. and picked up a copy of “Building a Website for Dummies”. She founded OnlineMedCerts and 16 years later sold the business on Flippa for $225,000.
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Read the full transcript of the conversation below.
Karen’s Entrepreneurial Journey
Blake Hutchison: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Humans of Flippa. Today I’m joined by Karen Boyer, who’s joining us from sunny Florida. For those of you who don’t know, I’m on the other side of the world here in Melbourne, Australia. It’s cold where I am. It’s hot where Karen is. And big welcome, Karen. Thanks very much for joining me today.
Karen Boyer: Thank you for having me.
Blake Hutchison: You’ve successfully sold an asset on Flippa, but before we get there, just tell us a little bit about yourself and that journey of starting an e-commerce business.
Karen Boyer: I was coming off a career of being a police officer and which was rather unique for a female at that time, and I really perceived myself as not having any civilian world skills and yet knew that I was extremely young and needed to figure something out quickly. I had no tech background, no medical background whatsoever, and I suddenly ended up find founding an e-commerce business, developing tech and medical programs, things I had no knowledge of, but it took off quite quickly and in the first month in business, I made more than I did in an entire year as a police officer.
Blake Hutchison: That is so cool. And I must admit, offline before we were filming, I said, “Oh, look, if we can talk a little bit about whether you had a background in that particular business or whether you didn’t,” and you’ve obviously just revealed that you certainly didn’t have a background. So how does that even happen? How do you decide to do something in that space? What led you to do it in the first place?
Karen Boyer: I think one thing that I’ve really discovered about myself over the years since founding Online Med Certs is I always have a real interest in doing things better in process improvement. After leaving law enforcement rather abruptly, I was taking a very short period of time to kind of figure it out, where I was going, and I decided to volunteer teaching CPR because really it was the only thing, I knew that I could do that didn’t involve law enforcement activities. And after teaching for a couple organizations, I left the first one because I thought, this is a terrible way to do this. And when I went to the second one, I found that theirs was even worse. And I thought I could do this better. So I did.
I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought How to Build a Website for Dummies. I was not actually really using email at the time yet because we’re going back about 17 years, maybe 18 years ago now. I figured it out overnight. I built a very crude website just out of a desire to see if I could do it better and I made money the next morning.
Karen’s Business Idea
Blake Hutchison: Oh, that’s fantastic, Karen. You can see my t-shirt. As we say, own your future, which is what you’ve obviously done. And so it’s quite incredible. So you buy a book from Barnes and Noble, you find your first customer, you end up running this business, Online Med Certs, for 16 or 17 years. You get it to a point where if you’re willing to say, I hope you don’t mind me saying sort of five to $7,000 revenue per month, and it’s doing really well. So why would you then so much time later, it’s probably an obvious question, but why did you consider selling it?
Karen Boyer: Well, I would also add, not only was it producing great revenue, but I was also working very little. I was working next to no hours a month, okay? I was basically getting paid for doing nothing. My husband, when we first met, he said, “Well, what does Karen do for a living?” “Well, she prints money.” And I really was kind of just printing money, and earlier on it was a lot of money because I had no competitors.
This was the first of its kind business. There were no competitors on the market. If I was spending a thousand dollars a month on Google Ads, I was having a heart attack. So certainly with no competition, the money was all mine. And certainly I developed some flattery competition over the years of a lot of people that saw what a great field it was. Making money to do nothing, that’s not wholly true. But I became very bored with it, and especially being a first of its kind, doing something that nobody else had ever done before, e-learning was not a thing then. I became bored and really wanted more human contact, for a lot less money a month, I might add.
Blake Hutchison: I do really love this story, and so just for context for everyone, so online cert, so you’re top-selling products with things like advanced cardiac Life support certification, basic cardiac life support certification. Is that right? People are buying certification for a medical skill?
Karen Boyer: They’re renewables. People who work in the healthcare field are required to carry these credentials and renew them every two years. There’s no inventory that I carried on the product. I could be anywhere. I held nothing. You want somebody else to say that you can perform these skills, that you’re competent in this, and that’s really the purpose that it served, was keeping doctors, being doctors and seeing patients yet getting that merit badge that they were required to have by their institutions.
The Exit Journey
Blake Hutchison: Oh, that’s fantastic. Really, really nice to hear and great learning for everyone. If you don’t mind, let’s fast-forward to the sale process. So you put it up for sale. You’ve chosen Flippa. I can see here that you had over 4,000 buyers looking at your listing, which is a fantastic number. You then had looks like sort of maybe 20 to 30 different discussions going on. You ultimately found a buyer. Do you mind just talking us through the sales process a little bit? A lot of people find it quite intimidating. It’s obviously quite complex when you’re selling something at this value, certainly in your case, in excess of $200,000. So tell us about the experience and how you found that.
Karen Boyer: I started thinking about selling the business probably now about three to four years ago. It had been on my mind to sell it. This wasn’t something new or spontaneous that I did. And a couple years back, I actually had looked at Flippa, and I got distracted by whatever and kind of put it in the back of my mind. And I reached a point that I was very much ready to do something different with my life, and certainly my station of life is changing. My kids are getting older and really don’t need mom money as much anymore. So I went back to Flippa. It was really the most appropriate avenue I could find to sell an e-commerce business.
And not only did the Ecommerce specialty speak to me, it was also the fact that Flippa was reaching out to potential buyers around the world because, as I said, there’s no brick and mortar involved in my business. There’s no inventory you can be anywhere. And I really felt that given the fact that I had no medical expertise or knowledge, basic knowledge, or how to run an e-commerce business, or any other business for that matter, I knew that there were going to be other people like me who those aspects really appealed to. Okay?
So I went back to Flippa and all of my questions were very readily answered. A nice team of people that if I had a question on the process, somebody was there to answer it. Okay? When the email blast went out, so I took six weeks or whatever to myself to go, “Okay, I’m really going to do this,” and kind of go through all my documentation, everything, sort of prepare myself, signed up with Flippa. It was a very seamless process, signing up, and I don’t feel intimidated, intimidating at all.
And then I decided to travel out of town to visit my college son. And while I was out of town, in fact, the first day that email blast that goes out around the world from Flippa get sent out and instantly I am getting pinged on my phone from people looking, people asking questions. I had no idea that it would be so fast and so extensive. It was really, really, in a very pleasant way, quite a surprise to me how it just took off like wildfire. From that moment on that that blast went out, it was just crazy how many people were interested in Online Med Certs. And there were some people that just said, “I’m not in the market to buy the business, but I just wanted to tell you what a great concept.” And then tenfold, there were people who were, “I’m interested in buying, tell me more.” And they were really people from all over the world.
Blake Hutchison: What was it about the eventual buyer and how did that negotiation play out? Whatever you’re willing to share there that might help other people.
Karen Boyer: It’s Thanksgiving night and I get a contact from one of the Flippa guys who’s on your continent, and he says, “I have a guy who right now who’s willing to do a buy it now. Are you interested?” Well, yeah. So it kind of set Thanksgiving upside down, but it was phenomenal. At that point, we started an interesting process that involved me in one country, my buyer in another country, my Flippa representative on another continent. It was very interesting to see so many people of different backgrounds and in different locations pulling this deal together. When it started, it just took off.
The Experience with Flippa
Blake Hutchison: Flippa adds about a thousand new buyers every day from all over the world, so there really is a great global pool of buyers from which to, I guess, farm and get deals done with. Now, in the negotiation, if you could just enlighten the rest of the world on the experience, what type of material above and beyond was on your listing itself did your eventual buyer want to see? Was there a quite extensive due diligence period? Were they quite interrogative?
Karen Boyer: The buyer and I, we had a very personal conversation over Zoom right around Thanksgiving, and it was very personal and I found that he was a parent of young kids and he was really attracted to the lifestyle that I enjoyed as a parent of young kids, that freedom, the ability to earn unlimited amounts of money from all over the world any time of day.
Blake Hutchison: That’s wonderful. And so, okay, let’s fast-forward. You’ve got this successful transaction that plays out, someone’s acquired your business. For the first time in 16 or 17 years post being a cop, as you say, what do you then do? You’ve had a successful exit. What’s life been like since then and what are you planning to do?
Karen Boyer: Well, the first month I got Covid. So we closed on the business New Year’s Eve, and I had a great time out New Year’s Eve. I have never celebrated in New Year’s Eve the way I did. Literally hours after the business closed, sold, and went into a month of Covid, so that was a bit of a drag, but was better for two weeks, starting to clean the house up again, some things that I had neglected to do during the very short period that Online Med Certs was up for business. So two weeks later I started another business.
Blake Hutchison: Fantastic. And is that business operational and going well?
Karen Boyer: I am still working, yes. It’s made it through another almost six months now. Still an entrepreneur, but I was bit by that bug very early and I don’t see myself ever giving that up.
Blake Hutchison: That’s pretty wonderful story, I must say, Karen, from being a policewoman to starting a business with $35, I think you said. I hope I’ve got that right. And then buying the book at Barnes and Noble, which was part of that startup cost, growing a business, and then eventually finding Flippa, going through that process and getting a really, really strong exit. Congratulations, and thank you so much for helping us out to learn a little bit more about you and your story today.
Karen Boyer: I am forever grateful for Flippa and that I booked Mark Flippa’s website quite a while ago so that I could easily come back to it and list Online Med Certs for sale. It was definitely the right thing for me to do, and I really no doubt that Flippa was the right place to list the business and a great group of people to help me through that process.
Blake Hutchison: Thank you so much for saying that. We appreciate that. And thank you so much for being a Human of Flippa.
Karen Boyer: Thank you.
