If you are going to buy a business, the best way to find the most profitable companies to choose from depends on one simple thing you must do.

It's not a hard thing to do. But when I trained people how to buy businesses, this separated the people who are now wealthy business owners today...and those who are telling their kids how they tried to buy a business and it never happened.

What is this one thing that made the difference?

Simple: The approach I teach people -- and, incidentally, use myself -- is to always be using at least five or six different approaches of finding businesses for sale each week.

In other words, don't just use a business broker. Don't just ask your friends if they know anyone selling a business. Don't just use an ad. Don't just use the Internet. Use at least five or six ways simultaneously.

In addition to using multiple approaches to finding businesses for sale, you should spend two, three, four hours on each approach.

If you have more time, go out and do more types of approaches. Do not increase the time on each.

In other words, the point I want to make here is stay out of ruts.

What I have found over the years of buying businesses and training others how to buy businesses is if you get a lot of balls in the air instead of finding one or two working, you’re going to find they’re all going to work.

What you definitely do NOT want to do is find one technique that works or maybe two techniques, and you beat it to death. You do that, and you probably are not going to find the best businesses to buy.

Instead, have a number of techniques going, and once you get a good number of techniques going at the same time, you’re going to find people will be coming back and bringing business to you. Instead of you going to them.