Meet the dead men holding my name.

Type my name into Google and you don’t get me. You get William “Billy Batts” Bentvena, 1933–1970, Gambino crime family — the man Frank Vincent played in Goodfellas, the “go home and get your shine box” scene, the body in the trunk. His spelling pulls 2,889 searches a month, plus another 1,177 for “billy batts goodfellas.”*

Behind him: Billy Batten, an English rugby league Hall-of-Famer who died in 1959. In Google’s Knowledge Graph the mobster scores 284, the rugby legend 75, and me — the one who’s alive, with a firm, a book, and a deal tape — roughly 24. When BlitzMetrics audited my name in June 2026, I had no Knowledge Panel, no Wikidata item, and no entity home. Two dead men were beating me at being me.

Understand the diligence moment.

Here’s why this isn’t a funny cocktail story. In M&A there’s a moment after the handshake when the seller’s lawyer opens a laptop and checks you out. For me, that search returned a murdered gangster, a 1950s rugby player, fragments of my LinkedIn — and an SEC alert on an unrelated Chicago company that happens to share my firm’s name (no affiliation, for the record).

Deals don’t die loudly at that moment. They just go quiet. Nobody emails you to say the search results felt off. The audit put it better than I could:

“He closes a broker’s year of deals every month. Google thinks he’s a dead mobster.”

— Billy Batt Authority Audit, cover page (BlitzMetrics, June 2026)

Disambiguate first. Amplify second.

The instinct is to shout louder — post more, run ads, flood the zone. Wrong order. Amplifying an ambiguous name just sends more people into the wrong search results. You don’t out-corroborate a Scorsese film on the dead man’s spelling, and you shouldn’t try.

The win condition is narrower and completely achievable: make my exact spelling, my firm’s name, and the AI-engine question “Who is Billy Batt?” resolve to the living one. “billy batt” had zero recorded search volume at audit time* — an empty lane. On zero-volume names, the first definitive page typically owns the result within weeks.

Build the home before the audience.

So the first move wasn’t content. It was plumbing: billybatt.com/ — unregistered until June 2026, about twelve dollars — built as a facts-first entity home. Person schema with a disambiguatingDescription that names the difference in machine-readable terms. One canonical identity string on every surface. The same footer line on every page of this site, telling Google and every checker exactly which Billy this is.

It’s the same trade I’ve always run, honestly. The oilfield taught me you don’t pour product through unpressure-tested pipe. My whole story is finding undervalued assets and rebuilding them right — it just took an audit to notice the most undervalued asset I owned was my own name.

End the joke on your deal tape.

Here’s the twist I’ve come to enjoy: the collision is also the hook. Nobody at a conference forgets the M&A guy who opens with the shine-box joke. The audit’s rule for using it:

“Nobody forgets the M&A guy who opens with the shine-box joke — provided the joke ends on his deal tape.”

— Billy Batt Authority Audit (BlitzMetrics, June 2026)

That’s the whole playbook for any operator with a crowded name. Lead with the wink, land on the receipts. Mine are 16+ closed deals across a $1M–$48M range* — eleven of them documented on a public tape. The dead man has the movie; I have the transactions.

If your own name is sitting unclaimed — or worse, claimed by someone you’d rather not be confused with — register the domain this week. It’s the cheapest acquisition you’ll ever close. And if the business you want to discuss is one you’re selling, you know where to find the living Billy Batt.

* Search and Knowledge Graph figures: Ahrefs (US) and BlitzMetrics KG Explorer, pulled June 10, 2026, per the Billy Batt Authority Audit. Deal figures self-reported by Prime Acquisitions Group (primeacquisitionsgroup.com), June 2026; largest documented transaction $24M.

Stop shopping where everyone shops.

Walk into any business-for-sale marketplace and you’re standing in a picked-over aisle with every other buyer on earth. Listed deals come pre-loaded with competition, inflated expectations, and a broker whose job is to run the price up on you.

The good businesses — the tired SaaS with loyal customers, the e-commerce store run by a founder who’s quietly done — mostly never get listed. The owner sells to whoever shows up first with respect and a workable structure. The entire game is being the one who shows up first.

Source at will — that’s the entire promise.

That’s why we built Buying Beast, the sourcing method I co-created with Andrew Baldwin out of Alberta, launched in 2023. And it’s why my book is titled the way it is: Unlimited Sellers Guide: For Finding Businesses to Buy at Will. Not “when the market cooperates.” At will.

A named, written-down system beats a talented improviser every time — I learned that running oilfield crews, where the checklist is the difference between a weld and a funeral. The method makes seller-finding a repeatable production process instead of a lucky break.

Let the machines make the first pass.

Prime Acquisitions Group is an AI-and-technology-first M&A team, and that’s not a brochure line — through Xcept AI, where I’m co-owner, we build the systems that power our own deal flow. AI-driven sourcing surfaces digital businesses before they hit the open market; humans spend their hours on the conversations that matter instead of the haystack.

“Typical brokers handle 2 to 6 deals annually — our team moves that volume every single month.”

— Prime Acquisitions Group (self-reported, primeacquisitionsgroup.com)

That volume claim is ours and I label it that way — self-reported.* But the mechanism behind it is exactly what this essay describes: when sourcing is systematic, volume stops being heroic.

Structure to close, not to impress.

Finding a willing seller is half the method. The other half is structuring a deal that actually closes. Look at our public transaction tape and you’ll see the toolbox in use: SBA preapprovals, seller financing, earn-outs — including a three-year performance earn-out on a $13.5M e-commerce SaaS — and a PE syndicate on a $24M enterprise AI deal.*

Off-market sellers aren’t auction sellers. They care about their team, their customers, and certainty of close — often more than the last dollar. A flexible structure is how you pay for certainty with something other than cash.

Show the tape.

Methods are claims. Tapes are receipts. Ours shows eleven documented transactions from a $275K productivity app to that $24M enterprise AI SaaS, inside a stated record of 16+ closed deals across a $1M–$48M range.* One aesthetics practice went from first conversation to closed in four weeks — that’s what showing up first with a workable structure buys you.

“Investors come to me when they want to buy online assets & businesses.”

— My Instagram bio, @billybattofficial — the whole method in one sentence

If you want the long version of how I got here, it’s on my About page. If you’d rather skip to the part where we talk about your business — buying one or selling one — the channels are here and my DMs are open.

* Deal figures self-reported by Prime Acquisitions Group (primeacquisitionsgroup.com), June 2026. Largest documented transaction: $24M; 11 deals on the public transaction tape.

Run the crews.

Before I ever heard the term “deal flow,” I ran pipe. Eight years in Northern Canada’s oilfields as a pipefitter and welder — gas plants, pipelines, steel that has to hold pressure in weather that wants to kill it.

By the end I was running crews of a hundred to a hundred and fifty men. People think welding was my education. It wasn’t. Logistics was. Materials, schedules, inspections, payroll, and a hundred-plus guys who need to know exactly what they’re building today and why. That’s an operating company. Nobody calls it that on a pipe rack.

Watch it crash.

The oilfield is feast or famine. You’re either eating well or you’re not eating at all — and which one isn’t up to you. It’s up to a commodity chart.

“I worked in the oilfield for eight years, running crews of a hundred, hundred and fifty guys — building gas plants, pipelines… I had a daughter on the way around 2015, and the oilfield crashed. I had to figure out a new way of being more stable and controlling my income.”

— Me, on the I AM CEO Podcast (ep. IAM1103, Aug 2021)

That sentence is the hinge of my whole life. 2015: oil collapses, the work disappears, and my daughter is on the way. A man with a torch and a mortgage doesn’t get to wait out a cycle. I needed income that answered to me.

Buy the books before the businesses.

My first acquisition wasn’t a company. It was a library card’s worth of other people’s experience. The 10X Rule came first, then everything else in Grant Cardone’s world. Then I paid for coaches — real money I didn’t really have — because tuition is cheaper than a decade of trial and error.

I taught myself lead generation, marketing, branding, and web development the same way I learned to weld: badly at first, then less badly, then well enough that people paid me. Trade school all over again, except this time I was the apprentice and the foreman.

Build for the people you knew.

I didn’t chase glamorous clients. I built an agency for contractors and real-estate pros — the people I’d worked beside for a decade. I knew what a job site actually runs on, what a slow month feels like, and what they’d pay to never chase another lead. Speaking customer wasn’t a marketing skill I learned; it was a first language.

Trade hours for assets.

The agency worked, but trading hours for invoices is still trading hours. What kept catching my eye was the asset underneath: the websites, the SaaS tools, the e-commerce stores. They could be bought — the way a tired gas plant gets bought, rebuilt, and run profitably.

So that became the business: buy the asset, rebuild the operations, sell the upside. I wrote Unlimited Sellers Guide to document how I find businesses to buy at will, co-created the Buying Beast sourcing method with Andrew Baldwin out of Alberta, and co-founded Prime Acquisitions Group — an AI-and-technology-first M&A team. As of June 2026 the firm reports 16+ closed deals across a $1M–$48M range,* with eleven transactions documented on our public tape.

Roll with the punches.

“Nothing changes — your challenges just change. You’ll still have hard times while you’re doing good… That’s why it’s called being an entrepreneur. You just know how to roll with the punches.”

— Me again, same episode

People hear “oilfield welder turned dealmaker” and assume the crash was the bad chapter. It wasn’t. It was the forge. The oilfield taught me that nothing stays up forever; 2015 taught me to own the thing that pays you. Everything since — the agency, the book, the firm — is just that lesson, compounding.

The full story, with the timeline and the receipts, lives on my About page. And if you’re holding a digital business and wondering what it’s worth to someone like me — my DMs are open.

* Deal figures self-reported by Prime Acquisitions Group (primeacquisitionsgroup.com), June 2026. Largest documented transaction: $24M; 11 deals on the public transaction tape.