Become a LQ Business Owner on Hawaii Island

> Back to Key Questions

What is your LQ? (LQ=Life Quality)
By Grif Frost, Managing Director VR Hawaii Island

Aloha from the Big Island of Hawaii! People talk about getting “rock fever” but you never hear about that from people who live on the Big Island because, well, the Big Island is "BIG"! 4600 Square Miles or roughly twice a large as all the other islands in Hawaii combined!

We are passionate about LQ Businesses. LQ=Life Quality. As a veteran of 40+ start-up businesses in Japan, the mainland and Hawaii I can tell you that some businesses are LQ Businesses and others definitely are not! We work to live and should not be living to work!

When a buyer contacts me the first question I ask them is "where do you want to live on the Big Island?". Remember that 13 of the 15 climates in the world can be found on this one island! Many buyers reply “wherever the best business acquisition opportunity is”. I emphatically tell them that first, they need to know where they want to live and then we can find them the right business near where they choose to live. Remember, improving your LQ starts with living in an LQ Environment!

My office is on the Penthouse Floor of the Lagoon Centre in Hilo, with expansive views of Hilo Bay, the Wailoa Lagoon Park and Wailoa River. A totally LQ Business office where nobody wears shoes (I don’t even own a pair of long pants!) and where we spend lots of time on our lanai "talking story" with clients while enjoying the views (we can see the cruise ships coming in and out of the bay plus have a bird’s eye view of Hilo International Airport so have fun watching various planes and helicopters landing and taking off).

My wife and I live in an apartment in the same building on the 8th floor…so our commute is just right…two stories up and down! Totally LQ Lifestyle! We made a conscious decision to improve our LQ in 2002 and it started with selecting where on the Big Island we wanted to live.

Once you know where you want to live on the Big Island, I suggest coming to visit us. Most of our businesses get sold to buyers who take the time to get to know us and vice versa…we then steer the business acquisition opportunities to the buyers we know will appreciate having the opportunity to consider them BEFORE we post the businesses on the websites.

As you may know from reviewing the Big Island opportunities, we require our seller clients to price their businesses at no more than 3.5 times the Seller’s Discretionary Earnings plus we require all seller clients to provide 50% seller’s financing, because it protects the buyer. Our businesses are usually LQ Businesses or businesses which with a few improvements can be turned into an LQ Business.

For example, one seller client who has a beautiful dive business in Kona had fallen into the trap of many business owners of micromanaging the business and pretty soon he was going 24/7…and that is definitely not an LQ Lifestyle! I made some suggestions about how he could contract out many aspects of his work and now he is taking 2 weeks vacations every three months, working 4 hours per day maybe and making even more money than he was when he was micromanaging the business. Now this business is an LQ Business!

In the 200+ businesses I have reviewed on the Big Island, all of them could increase their prices 15% without losing any customers and virtually all of them could reduce their expenses by 15% by doing a simple 80/20 analysis of which 20% of the products are producing 80% of the profits.

Because the business environment here can be kind of island style many business owners forget a cardinal rule of an LQ Business which is pass 100% of the increased costs on to the customers immediately!

I often tell my mainland buyers that "if they work half as hard as they did on the mainland they will be WAY ahead of the competition!"... and this actually is an understatement. The opportunity here for mainland buyers is to acquire a business at a fair price and be able to rapidly increase the profitability of the business by applying the above LQ Business rules.

But remember you are here to improve your LQ so although you will work hard in the beginning getting to know your business inside and out make sure to remember why you moved here…focus on your strengths and delegate tasks that do not utilize your strengths.

People often talk about how hard it is to find good employees…my experience here has been that the challenge is not finding good employees but finding good business owners who are willing to create an LQ Business working environment that enables employees to shine!

Once you make the move here it is important to adapt to the Island Lifestyle...take the time to “"talk story" and get to know your employees and customers. Slow down! Sometimes new business owners from the mainland are still 24/7 and this actually can drive away your best employees and customers...so kick back a bit and enjoy paradise!

I know many LQ Business owners on the island who earn $300,000+ and yet only have to work when they choose to work. These LQ Business owners are the happiest people I know!

Most of them also shuck the mainland lifestyle of having to have more….they wear shorts, aloha shirts, sandals, drive used cars (my 1995 Jeep has 275,000 miles on it and keeps on trucking even though I drive around the island-200 miles-every week…and since it looks local I get favored treatment by locals). Low key. Kicked back. Enjoy life. Focus on what is really important to you….health, family and making money from doing something you are passionate about!

So come see us…get to know us…so we can help you find the right LQ Business for you!

  Top of Page