#98 with Ryan Begelman - How to Bootstrap Buying a Mountain

sean couldn't make today at some type of thing here to deal with okay so sam par i have a guest today name's ryan bi man we're gonna talk a little bit about who he is and we'll get some get to some ideas right away this guy who's here name's ryan i've met him i we had a bunch of friends of friends i met him recently when did i meet him like online like only two weeks ago he joined trends and i met them there and i'm on this road trip right now so right now i'm am i'm living in utah for a week and i'm on gonna live saint louis and new york and it was a coincidence that ryan works here and lives here and so i'm staying at his house and so we're in a huge house that he rented out and it's lovely and we're gonna get into it so ryan's kind of a weirdo in the best possible sense done a ton of stuff he had this company called biz media which actually was a huge inspiration for my company to the hustle he started this thing called summit series then they bought this fifty dollar mountain called powder mountain and they've done a ton of other stuff and he's only thirty seven and he did most of this by thirty super fascinating all bootstrap let's learn about it so ryan what do you say is your is your story what where where did it start well i grew up outside of washington dc when's the school in the midwest always wanted to be an entrepreneur and know did the typical wall street banking private equity thing worked at the carly out group is you know one of the world's largest private equity firms and while i was there i was looking for real estate to buy on the side and so i started reading this little newsletter called biz that mark and elliot biz now i had founded mark was the father elliot at the sun and i cold outreach to to elliot at the sun because i was thinking shoot i wonder if i could buy this company or join or you know buy into this company and that would help me leave carl and start my journey of buying real estate and owning a cash flow positive you know news and media company that also had influence in the real estate world and so i ended up striking a relationship with elliot and we ended up figuring out this deal deal where basically we would buy a big chunk of the company from his dad and and we would expand the company into new markets so his dad was in dc we would expand it to new york and chicago and eventually twenty eight metro markets and so i basically bought into the company and over seven and a half years we bootstrap the company the twenty eight metro markets becoming the largest commercial real estate publisher and conference business in north america and eventually the united kingdom and in two thousand sixteen i sold the company to a private equity firm but you sold it for fifty million dollars too which is pretty huge win yeah and we and we were always you know we were profitable pretty much from the the jump and so you know it's as a really i think it's a really cool story because we did it all bootstrap like you know elliott and i each put in about dollars in two at the end of two thousand eight so a little fan total and you know and over the course of seven a half years generated over dollars of of distributions either from profits or from selling the company not not all of that you know we got to keep there was you know a management team and others but i think what's unique about it is that there was no venture capital there was no no lenders no no syndicate we just did it all through profitable sales so basically like i mean a lot of people who listen to this are hustle readers and the reality it was we i copied you guys but further perspective it was like the hustle but for real estate and in different cities yeah exactly was it was an email of newsletter like super you know it sounds old fashioned to make money off of email news but and then real the real money maker of business you know advertising was a small portion of it but was it was all about events and our events were these kinda like hyper local commercial real estate events for you know brokers developers investors lenders at architects anyone who's interested anyone is doing business in commercial real estate and what was unique about it it was we could deliver an audience of like four hundred to a thousand professionals every everyday three hundred conferences a year almost every business day of the year somewhere in north america so like you know maybe today we've got an event in dallas on you know office buildings and then next week we've got an event in brooklyn and it's about you know hotels in brooklyn and perhaps kind of the crazy thing is at the same time we built a few other companies we we built summit which you mentioned which is this gathering for all kinds of leaders from you know artists academics to with scientists and entrepreneurs and anyone doing something really interesting that we thinks a kind person bra you have you heard of summit series summit summit series yeah you guys mentioned the last podcast that's where heard it it's pretty nuts it's like this four or five thousand person event that cost three to six grand and they do it in the in like a rural areas or in a cruise ship it's pretty it's like ted talk for twenty eight year olds but ex like in a secluded area but you but here's what's cool they would do it outdoors or whatever and then eventually they said well they found this mountain and they bought this mountain so ryan and his buddy's bought this mountain for forty or fifty million dollars and i'm on that mountain now like i went up there yesterday it's crazy it was like an all dirt mountain and they built all this infrastructure around it but right so like you had biz now you're running at you took a few months off to start summit series and then you took a few months off summit series and then bought this mountain is that right yeah so we got to this point where biz was like maybe thirty forty employees and summit had had you know maybe twenty employees and you know they each had this growing audience and wow my business partner elliott he fell in love he loves skiing and he fell in love with this place called powder mountain in utah and that this this other guy that was a an a attendee of summit grade mo introduced him to and it's kind of just like hidden gem like the the guy who created powder mountain was this really adventurous guy was a sheep and he built the first chair lift in nineteen seventy two in here at powder mountain in utah and so we came along in two thousand twelve and bought the ski resort and ten thousand acres it's actually the largest ski resort by ski acreage in the united states and i think now canada as well with whistler so it's huge it's you know it's bigger than vale but it's got seven lifts and i mean we didn't know anything about ski companies we didn't know anything about you know building roads or development or how to build a brokerage company to sell land but in two thousand twelve we we learned all of that you know bit by a bit as we went but once again i think what's kinda cool about the stories is that we bootstrap it you know you you would think normally for a project like that you know you'd go to blacks stone you'd raise a hundred two hundred million dollars you'd buy the land and then you'd spend you know fifty to you know few hundred million dollars on infrastructure at lodge and hotels and and instead we went to the summit community to people that we loved and trusted and who believed in us and we say hey come out experience a free event at the mount in we hosted you know about a thousand people over ten events and while we had the the mountain under contract and we said they'll put up a million to two million dollars and once we own the mountain we'll develop roads we'll develop utilities and will give you a lot and you'll build a beautiful house on that lot and you'll bring your family there and it'll be the this amazing second or primary home and after we saw our two hundred and fiftieth lot you'll get your money back and so you'll basically get your lot for free and be a part of this amazing new community and so that's that's how we financed buying the mountain and and building the initial infrastructure logic how many how many summit events have you done up into that point i mean we were doing basically one or two big ones a year for four years plus a lot of like little events so then you at that point maybe you would had ten or twenty a thousand attendees throughout at all your events yeah that that's probably right something like that okay let's say it's ten thousand and you just called all as many ten thousands as you think you could and you're like you tried to convince fifty of them to give you a million dollars each and you promise them i promise you're gonna have a house on this mountain and that you and then you convince those fifty fifty people to each give a million and then you went to the guy that had the property goes alright here's fifty million we want it yeah that that's pretty much it only there's a cool little element to the story we we had a big event that we were already planning to do in tahoe in two thousand i guess in two thousand twelve and it was called summit base camp it was actually a skiing event it was an event where we would take people get to go skiing i had about eleven hundred attendees at the event and we went around during the event to fifty people that we knew really well and that we thought we'd love to be a part of this project who really were adventurous and and and we said and we gave them this little this little kinda like business card that said like show up cancel your flight and be in the lobby on the final day of our event and on that final day we chartered a big boeing aircraft and we had a bus ready and we took everyone onto this plane where we have like a comedian performer on plan we did this whole fun kind of experience we brought everyone to this crazy place powder mounts and drove up to the top of the mountain you were you were up there yesterday you know it's insane up there you can see the great salt lake you can see wyoming you can see idaho you can even see nevada and and we took them and we said we're gonna build the future home of summit here and we want you to be a part of it and you know it's gonna cost about a million bucks and ultimately you'll get that million dollars back and you know and that's kinda how it started bra you is that shit crazy and that's awesome it's pretty wild and i went up there and i like i was like wait who what earth would trust because brian you were like in your late twenties and your partners were are a little younger than you right yeah i was twenty nine i think my partners were twenty seven twenty eight and you're like well we've never done anything like this before but we're gonna break you this mountain give us a million dollars and i promise that like ten years i'll probably hopefully be a thing yeah it was it was it was definitely the bold most ambitious you know we have this slogan and some of make no small plans and this definitely was that i mean we you know we had thought we were kind of known for doing crazy shit like this like we had we had taken it over in the year before in two thousand eleven an entire cruise ship which i'd i've never heard of at that time anyone doing anything quite like it and you know that was pretty insane like we took we had to we had unlike a hotel where you can pay in deposits you know the cruise ship you have to put all your money up and so that was like literally every dollar that we had in the company and every dollar that me and my partners had it in our personal bank accounts much did you have to put down for it i think that first cruise ship we had to put down like like i don't know like two to three million dollars all all like but what's crazy is like it's all before you've even sold like you know you're just starting to sell tickets like before you saw a ticket was the event business profitable yeah the event business was profitable i as we got bigger we actually became you know less profitable and more focused on this like super long super like you know many decade approach to building community our i think our passion was really about building an awesome community and living like a really interesting lifestyle as we did it business now on the other hand that was always much more focused on like you know how do you build great business that's that's profitable and also serves a community and summit it was a little bit more about you know how do you optimize for a community first great well so ryan you you what do you say you are you retired at the moment or in between stuff you know i i think i'm in between i'm looking for my night's adventure i've been looking a lot at you know kind of micro private equity buying companies that are about three hundred thousand in profit of three million you know you at andrew wilkinson on your show from tiny you know they're basically doing something kind similar to that is something i've been kinda ob accessing about lately this is the most like me thing to do but i also think it's the most like me and you ryan the type of people who we are which there are many of us like we just meet randomly on the internet and then go and hang out and so i'm up here me and sarah and my wife and just ryan are in this massive house and for the last three days all we've done is brainstorm on interesting ideas and ryan it was friends with adam neumann the founder of we where he's friends with all these people who have come to his events like ranging from like world leaders like bill clinton like richard branson into like the founder and like if you name a company of a a billion dollar company he's like yeah they spoke like i talked to them so his perspective is interesting and all we've done is go through ideas so let's just do it oh and by the way you're specialty by the way it seems as like bootstrapping like you don't wanna raise any money but you wanna build well you wanna build pretty big businesses right yeah i mean i i hate this you know this term lifestyle entrepreneur but i feel like we could rebranded it as maybe holistic list the entrepreneur and you know you and i've been arguing about this over the weekend but like my my philosophy is that most entrepreneurs have been fed this kind of this this reasoning that they should build a disruptive company and that you know tam total addressable market is super important they should go after like a billion dollar concept and build a unicorn and and you know i have so many friends i've at a front row seat like you said the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and so many of them end up in this situation where they're like you know seven ten twelve years into their business they've only made a salary in the entire time and their business is only potential for making them like real money is to sell it to a strategic because they're bleeding cash so they can't sell a private equity they they're not gonna do a management buyout they can't borrow against the company because it's losing money and so they have to go public or sell to a strategic most are not big enough to go public and you know usually there's only like three or four strategic they can sell to like a software company can maybe sell to you know salesforce facebook google like there's just not that many and there's only a couple of decision makers of each company that make those decisions and you know they they might just change your strategy any given year so i've seen a lot of people live with a tremendous amount of stress you know focusing on growth and my point is there's there's a lot of ways that you can just build a company to accomplish your actual goal which for me know i think for many entrepreneurs is is making just like a reasonable amount of income and so i think there's ways to reverse engineer how to do that and so a lot of my ideas are around bootstrap businesses as businesses that you can start with little to no money and you know and and get up to making yourself you know a half a million a million three million a year and then if you wanna sell you know great you could also always sell your company and if it's profitable the good news is you could sell it to a private equity firm him and so you know my thought on that is one don't build capital intensive companies two like build companies up positive working capital you know companies like the hustle where you sell advertising and then you deliver it later you sell a ticket you deliver it later and then you know there's riches and niches so like don't worry about giant addressable markets like all the venture you know companies tell you and and then so you know what how do you find these these kinds of companies well you know one you can look at who private equity firms are buying because they're generally buying profitable businesses and then figure out a smaller version of that business to start alright today's episode is brought to you by tempo tempo dot fit is the website actually use this i've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this three d sensor and what it does is they give you weights it's like a hundred and fifteen pounds of weights and it's for strength training so what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting it sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in what your part rate is it's pretty amazing and then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift how many to lift what workout to do whether you wanna do a twenty minute ten minute fifty minute workout it's pretty amazing but the best part is the leader board the other stuff all the features that they have that's cool but i'm obsessed with the leader board because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing and you can compete with other people who have taken the same class so it's maybe wanna work harder lift more weight or have more endurance it's just pretty freaking fun and the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that'll will make you live longer and this product tempo it checks that box for me so they're our sponsored today if you use the code tempo hustle you'll get a hundred dollars off so tempo dot fit is the url and tempo hustle one word you'll get hundred dollars off so check it out i use it if you look me up on twitter you'll see i'm always filming videos where i'm talking to that company say i'm trying to crush their employees on the leader board because i actually love this thing and i and i use it all the time so check it out you know i love like your i love your show because you guys talk about frameworks you what you wanna talk about frameworks for second yeah i mean sean is like i told you and bra will say this sean is like the framework king he like hone everything into a framework yeah i i love frameworks too and i i've been studying your your frame we're doing it of course un bundling is an excellent one you look at reddit take one thing that's working well on there you know look at five or etcetera you know another one i've been thinking about on my my last you know six months off is think about like three columns you've got all your marketing tactics in one column that you could study like paper per click advertising seo etcetera and then you've got another column for like monetization methods right you could like sell tickets to an event you could sell courses like there's all these ways to mono ties an audience and then third are markets and like you know go study bunch of markets and once you've studied all these three columns and you just cross poll them a bunch and you come up with just different perm mutations and i i've been doing that because i'm looking at buying companies and i wanna be able to look at a company and say okay here's a great company but here's three ways of marketing that they're missing here's two monetization tactics that they haven't thought of yet and like here's another market that or another audience they could go after with their products and all i then have to do is buy that company which i can do by raising a little bit of capital or borrowing from a you know the spa and just make those improvements and that's a really easy way to make a decent living or a lot of money and and so i've been thinking about that i i think another you know fun way to go about this is just get into different interesting hobbies especially hobbies that people in san francisco austin and new york la are not doing so like you know pickle ball is is really big and and a lot of america just as an example but you can get like you know friend of mine just is getting into learning how to rescue people who are in trouble like in the mountains which is like part of the fire department and so you know you learn a really niche hobby and then you see niche problems in that hobby and then you just come out with little products for that little niche and test different things that are you know generally cash flow positive early on so you know like those are some of the things i i've been thinking a lot about lately alright well let's get right into the ideas what interests you i mean so again i love these ideas i can be like can be profitable really quick but can scale kinda limitless so you know like just like a random one would be you could build masterclass for doctors so you know you could basically film a bunch of the top doctors most famous doctors in in america and you could you know create a series like masterclass class where people can pay a subscription doctors can pay a subscription to to learn from other doctors how do they build this super successful practice but the way to get that off the ground initially without having mean to raise venture like masterclass class raise a lot of money is you go around and you persuade twenty doctors to pay you you know four or five grand to be a part of a live zoom meeting interview with other doctors that have built more successful practices than them and you use that initial eighty grand from those first twenty doctors to start to build your service or start to build your off offering i i saw you do this kinda with your your idea course for example there's a company related to this but not it and i'll let you know if it it like and like it's kinda cool so health stream have you heard a health stream no i don't know that one it's publicly traded so let's see what their tagline is so they say health stream is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through development of health care organization's greatest asset their are people and so what they if i had a dumb down i would say that it's a it's a video program that hospitals buy for their nurses and their doctors just it trains it trains their nurses on like up to date stuff and it's just a it's this a video really like a video thing like a video system and it does about three hundred million dollars a year in sales and it's publicly traded at like a multi billion dollar market cap oh no no no sorry seven hundred million dollar market cap so i there's totally demand for what you're describing i think yeah we we had a we had a biz medical newsletter for a period and i mean there's just tons and tons and tons of doctors out there and it's a very splinter market and they need to learn how to build their practice and so you know i think there's bunch of education products there and another area that i've been really fascinated to buy is drop servicing or some people call product servicing have you heard of this no what's does that mean so okay you know what drop shipping is right yeah yeah what wait say drop shipping you said yeah like okay so drop shipping right yes is basically i don't own or make the product i don't keep inventory of the product but i build a beautiful website i go on facebook i push a bunch of i push a bunch of marketing i get people to come to my website i my website talks about say i don't know a vitamin i have a company in china that manufactures the vitamin on order whenever i have orders i'm basically just a marketing you know funnel and every time i get an order i call that company or you know i push it to them and they ship the product to the customer and i basically make the margin between what it cost to buy it from the manufacturer and my marketing cost and so that's pretty cool and that's been around for a long time and it's very competitive market but a newer market that i think is gonna get much much bigger is drop servicing where you basically you go on fiber or you go on etsy and you look for services that exist on those platforms and you pick one of them so say like i wanna create a service it's like hey we can we make logos and we're a great logo maker so i build a website that's like we make the best logos in the world i go on facebook and market my website so and then i go on fiber and i hire contractors around the world to actually fulfill the orders and provide that service and i'm essentially this like middle but you know the buyer doesn't know that the buyer thinks that i've got you know my designer working in my office you know in manhattan but they're really in ukraine and they're really just contractors what what's preventing you from watching this right now i mean i've been actually looking at acquiring some some companies in this area like like you know you could there's companies that are doing pretty cool stuff like you know maybe you want to have you know i don't know a drawing of your wife or your wedding you know you wanna have a husband and wife drawn for like a card like we could have we could launch like you know wedding drawings dot com where we make you know a really cute drawing for your wedding you know and whatever hundreds of thousands of people getting me how many people getting married every year we're gonna own that niche every time someone google's that and and we're gonna target people on facebook etcetera so like you know this is this is this is a really great business and you can start it with basically no money so i i know two guys who did this the first is wp p curve so wp p curve and you know design pickle right you said design pickle yeah so design design pickle a starbucks by guy named rust who i'm friends with i think he does like fifteen million dollars a year in sales i do what you're saying which is like you need a logo that make your logos really quickly and then and they do any like design work you need on demand but through a subscription service well when they started it they were heavily inspired by wp curve it was started by my friend alex and if you google wp curve revenue what you can find out is they would reveal their revenue and profit every single month and they and it's kind of interesting so they were at like let's say it looks like eighty five thousand dah they were at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in monthly revenue and what they would did is they just had a team of wordpress people on staff just like you're describing and anytime you had a small wordpress problem you paid a subscription and you would get to have someone fix whatever was broken your wordpress site and they eventually sold it to godaddy for a good amount of money or a small amount of money but what you're describing that service one of the issues i think people have with it is you it i there was problems with scaling it like of how do you like let's say you have like ten thousand orders a day how do you fulfill all that that was i think what when i talked to my friends alex and russ of these businesses that is the the downside of this would you agree with that or no yeah although i see that as an opportunity so the barrier to entry in the business is building a great order management technology platform which you could build with a handful of code you know that you hire in abroad for relatively small amount of money but you know basically what you need to design as a great order management platform because ultimately what you're doing is you're managing probably you know fifty eventually do a couple hundred contractors around the world now one way to make this simpler by the way is you hire agencies so you know a lot of the things you see on fiber they look like an individual but it's actually an agency that's you know prop up in you know wherever you know say in ukraine for example and maybe they've got you know thirty employees that are managing so you go make a deal with them that you're gonna bulk buy from them and get a great rate and that you know that you're gonna pay them whatever thirty bucks to make your logos that you sell for two hundred and so but yeah ultimately what you need is a great platform where where the creators on your platform the consultants can go on the platform and grab the order and you have to create like roles of parameters like you know hey if i put this up here i need someone grab this within seventy two hours and fulfill it and so it it comes down to like fulfillment you know the challenge is around hiring service contractors and and of course quality control and customer service but those i think those are relatively small challenges and and i think that those jobs will at least create some barrier to entry what me and sean always talk about or what we we were talking about lately we're like there's some businesses like we were talking about this railroad guy who i'm obsessed with and he's like you're not actually in the business of like making cool ass trains you're in you're in the real estate business and what you're describing is like you're not actually in the logo business you're in the operations business of like just how do i make this how do i like so the the the skill set that you need and the temperament and the things that you like wanna care about when going into this just how do i make us something that like this smoothly operate not how do i make like the best logos for people yeah totally i mean i mean you'd also make like awesome design guidelines for your artist and you would do things and make the logos but you're absolutely right you're basically you know you need to be a great marketer a good at customer service created hiring and you have to build some proprietary task you know to do the order management part you try to throw you another another idea i'm excited about yeah you see what i'm highlighting here yeah yeah i so subscription membership so i love subscription membership a friend of mine i'll give him a shout out joel holland who i've really admire he's been coming to summit from day one he acquired a business from kind of like a mom and pop who had built this great membership where it allows people to park their rv at wine they had like fourteen hundred wine around the united states and if you have an rv you can park at any of these wine for free and the wine like it because the people who park there are buy wine and go on tours and they already have the space anyway and the rv love it because it's like a more creative place to stay than your typical rv park and so joel bought the business and they they weren't doing a lot of online marketing and so he just need improve the website and improve the online marketing but ultimately what he has is tens of thousands of rv years you know and what i love about this story is that joel had sold his first company and bought an rv and traveled around the country so it's a good example of getting into like a hobby that people in silicon valley are not paying attention to what's it called harvest host yeah harvest hosts and how big is it you know i think they're doing i know that at one point they were doing over seven you they're doing low seven figures in profit i don't know exactly what the revenue is and you know it's a it's an amazing it's a very inexpensive it's eighty i think it's like sixty eighty bucks a year depending and yeah it's a membership company with low churn and super happy customers and you know joel runs it with one full time employee in a handful of contractors and he lives in va colorado and like the this by the way this is the kind of entrepreneur feel like should be our heroes like you know we we like to talk about the masks and the bezos but like those people live you know these extreme lives that are awesome to write books about but it's really hard to do that and like invest in your marriage and like you know in your children and have a nice life where whereas joel you know he's working from va colorado with his wife he's about to you know have his first child and he's running this great business making seven figures why do you like that more than so like you you said you knew adam newman and you you've hang out with him a lot and when you you adam newman the guy started we work he's got like this huge i mean we works massive and then you were joking around that like he's got these side projects which are also just freaking massive and when you talk about that it sounds so exciting why do you are you not more interested in some of these bigger things versus some of these smaller things so i i think like step one is just try to free your side i see entrepreneurship as like a vehicle for creating freedom freedom to decide what time you wanna wake up what you wanna wear to work the freedom the work of like you know friends of yours and you know like summit is a great example of this like an and biz we we've spent the last twelve years living all around the world hanging out with incredible people and building something that we really enjoy and love and so i think joel is a great example of that and whereas if you're if you're adam neumann or if you're you know bezos it's like you're you're basically trapped in the growth game like you have to grow or your investors are not gonna be happy and you're not gonna make real money and for every adam neumann you know i i can tell you from being around all these people at summit you know there's all add most like one out of ten make it i mean the venture firms that are are backing these people expect only one intend to make it if if that and so for one most of them don't make it and then the ones who do make it like you know i've you know i don't know a hundred of these billionaire biographies they usually end up divorced not that happy their children don't know them well like and so that's why i i really admire these people who build you know these smaller businesses and you know and small businesses drive the american economy too but however you know if you wanna look at my story another way to do it is get one business going like you've done with the hustle get yourself to profitability get yourself to the freedom from working for you know working for your know some sort of employer that's developing real wealth and then if you still wanna do your crazy fun project or mood moonshot set up a separate llc hire better management for your existing company so that you're not working full time on your company that makes your you're living and then you know go buy a mountain and go launch we work you know away whatever that is what else interests you what are the ideas well i'm also i mean i i love of course i love like you i love newsletters so i've you know there's all kinds of niches there like recently i was i was talking to a friend about you know like my my mom has as crohn's and colitis which is like a chronic disease that affects a lot of people and there's no good newsletter for it so i was thinking about you know could you build premium subscription newsletters for you know different diseases that you know have millions of people who suffer from these things and they need to be updated on the latest treatments and things and things of that nature so i've also been thinking about these newsletters by the way so there's these people i've seen these people do this and it's almost like do you remember that book called what to expect when expecting no i don't know the one okay so it's a book written in the in nineteen eighty four it's called what you expect when expecting and it's like it was a massive hit it sold fifteen million copies let's see ninety percent of all expected mothers ninety percent of all expected mothers who read a pregnancy guide read what to expect when expecting so it's like a huge huge deal and so some of these some people have created these email newsletters that are quite large and what they do is like you sign up and you say how far along your pregnancy you are and then you get newsletters based off like what you expect now in this week and then this week and then this week and then they sell you products that might help it like help you know i don't know anything about pregnancy but you know this week you might be struggling with this thing or this thing here's like some drinks that help alleviate that are you talking like you would do that for illnesses like if you're this far along and cancer like you might be struggling this with this like some people say that like this type of stretch helps alleviate some of the pain yeah i mean i i think there's there's just all these chronic diseases out there and you need to keep up with the latest research to latest medicine who are the top doctors in the space you know a lot of these things you can even get like some government aid if you're if you don't have the money to afford some of the treatments and so there's just a lot to learn like i've just seen a number of my friends get afflicted with something you know whether it's cancer or chronic disease and and and they've just had this huge learning curve and then every year they have to stay on top of it and and there's just not from what i've seen great news and updates for that sort of thing and i think people would happily you know pay a small subscription fee for that i agree my wife had this thing where she had this illness whatever and she didn't know who to turn to and she found this group on facebook with like ten thousand women who suffer from the same thing and that's been like her her peer group on how to like her she has a doctor tone one thing but she's like i need i wanna talk to other women who are going through this and that and and so she uses this facebook group constantly so i totally understand the need that you're describing and you could actually one hundred percent add operations around this and like make it proper yeah one one thing i love it you said there too is i'd really like where you could combine content community and experiences and i think you've done a great job of this with trends and and i think biz now is a good example of this and summit it and you know you create this great content people like to subscribe to it you could have a freemium model where they get you know million people are buying or you know have the free subscription newsletter and a small segment of them pay for the premium newsletter that has better you know updates and you know research or what have you but as part of that they get access to either a physical or online or or both community and then you could create experiences where you know everyone who's you know suffering from you know colitis gets together once a year and they do a charity walk or you know things of that nature and so you you can create all three of those great what else well another one that i got really excited about some years ago i love experiences and i i really like cheap amusement and i'm obsessed with like you know different versions of like small time versions of like you know disney and so i really got into haunted houses for a period and looking at building them and buying them and basically rolling up the haunted house industry oh my gosh that's crazy have have you have you heard of meow wolf yeah i'm up obsessed with y'all do you wanna tell people what mia wolf is bra you have you heard of this i've heard of the names and that got attraction somewhere right yeah go say what it is yeah so it's it's it's part of this whole trend of reinventing the museum right like you used to go to the museum and the museum was like you can't take pictures you can't touch anything and of course like that doesn't you know create any traffic for them online because no one's taking photos and it feels you know not very interactive but meow wolf came along and they got artists to come together and build these incredible spaces he's really immersive artistic rooms where you can walk through and touch and feel kinda like what you can do with art at burning man and experience art in this really dynamic way and take pictures and then the pictures of course get posted to things like instagram and that just does feel free marketing for them and you know now they're expanding i forgot it you know sam where do they start they started in either vegas or phoenix i forget what started in phoenix and now they're launching vegas and i just heard that they're gonna launch in washington dc and yeah it's just a great concept and i've there's a number of there's you know there's twenty nine rooms by that media what's that media company that you know it created twenty nine rooms what twenty nine rooms so twenty nine rooms is a pop up that travels around the country before covid of course oh refinery twenty nine yeah refinery twenty nine this is actually g samuel you'll love this one so because it this is this combined selling sponsors and tickets it's like it's like the new event model so they go to say brooklyn they get it they'd find a cheap warehouse that's empty and they lease it for say you know i don't know three weekends and they now it's on on through their newsletter and online hey we're coming to tower we're gonna be in brooklyn tickets are like you know what are fifty bucks and there's literally the tickets sell out wayne in advance and you show up to this kinda like red rope event like you're walking into a nightclub and they get twenty nine usually like local cool artists to pop up a room and build this immersive experience but each room is branded with a different sponsor and has some sort of like meaningful thing so it's like you know maybe it's like re ba talking about you know curing cancer and so it's like you know this amazing immersive art experience it's got like re box gonna and then everyone takes picture oh and here's the genius part they light it like it's like like you're on a studio like they light it with like so that every picture you take is the best picture you've ever taken which is really genius it cost a bunch of money to rent all the lighting equipment but that's what creates a lot of the free marketing for them and so and then on top of it they sell drinks so they sell alcohol and it's just it's a really fun experience so mia wolf that business it does over a hundred million dollars a year in sales i believe yeah the museum of ice cream was was recently said there was a deck that went around where there they were raising money at like you know a nine figure valuation i believe that that's another similar concept yeah it didn't it didn't work out obviously because of what's going down now but yes so i out i i learned a couple things about this business one if you can serve alcohol which is super high margin than the than the business is better and the second thing is if you can sell you can sell corporate events so like you can have like a law firm come and host like you know outing for their firm or for their clients if you can add those two components to an to like a cheap amusement business then the business goes from like a ten percent margin business to like a thirty percent margin business and so i i'll tell you i'll tell you one other thing that i think is cool about this is you know sam you and i are talking this weekend about about structure and i i think that if people understood what private equity firms understand about structure then they could get a lot wealthier and build firms that don't require venture and so an example of this is like let's say i wanted to open up like a hatch throwing bar you know again post covid i i you could create a holding company that you own a hundred percent of and then you could create a new llc and that llc raises a couple million bucks and it launches the very first of this you know hatch throwing bar concepts in you know wherever in charlotte and then you raise money against that so the the investors are are banking on making money on that first location but you then license the brand from your holding company and all the ip the concept the best practices the systems from the holding company to this new llc and so yeah and you charge a new llc like maybe five percent of revenue this is this is kinda how mcdonald's works and so you may make each location its own llc with its own investors but but you ultimately own a hundred percent of the holding company and you're making a percentage of revenue off of every single location what value does the holding company provide the holding company it has all of like the design the the all the methods it's it does you know it manages all like the the low location so it's basically like like kinda like like what marriott is for like a a developer it's basically the brand it's the marketing company it's the systems etcetera where okay so we had on brian sc who did this with one eight hundred got junk and it sounds pretty great your customers are ultimately the franchisees which is good and bad it's not like your your customers aren't always like the person buying the stuff right but this is what virgin did right this is what virgin did or no yeah it's a it's a little bit like virgin i mean and and it's not really a franchise model if you could also make it a franchise model eventually in fact you could do both but what it what it is is each location you say look i'm gonna put in a hundred grand into the first location or into each location and i'm gonna raise you know nine hundred grand let's say cost a million to open a location and so and by the way after the investors and i each get back our money after i get back my hundred grand and they get back their nine hundred grand then because i'm doing all the work in the sweat and i came up with the idea and i found the location and everything else i'm gonna go from owning ten percent of this location to owning maybe thirty i'm gonna get an extra twenty percent just like a venture firm or private firm gets an extra twenty percent after they return the money plus a return so now i own thirty percent of every location plus i'm charging each location like you know say five percent of revenue and so over time my holding company is becoming increasingly valuable and on top of it each location i own thirty percent of and so now at any time if i wanna sell a whole location to another owner and make some money or if i wanna sell the holding company i can do i can do either one of those things so i love i love creating flexibility and structure and managing risk and upside in this way and i we're whereas as where what most people do right is they they create one concept and they spend ten years hoping that they make some money and and it might not okay so what's the alternative then like like what's like the franchise model alternatives that at no you're saying they hope that this one concept works what's the alternative to that the the alternative is like i'm saying it like let's say location one is only breaking even you could tweak things and then you could open up location too and you could improve things and you could raise money against each llc separately and may or maybe you open up a location in charlotte and it fails because the mar it didn't have like a product market fit there but then you open it up in like another neighborhood that's more appropriate for the concept and it takes off there and so you're you're basically protecting yourself by having these various entities but at the same time you're creating value up in the holding company as well and so i just i just like this kind of like way of thinking about having separate llc and structuring things in this in this kind way and again like you know mcdonald's it's marriott a lot of other companies have a model kind of like this why haven't you done this yet with summit or biz now or why didn't you well we we did do some version of i mean it's not quite the same but but we had different companies so we had biz now we had to summit summit powder mountain was a separate company we we have you know we had a thirty million dollar venture fund called summit action fund which is a totally separate venture and you know if summit action fund only breaks even but you know summit powder mountain is profitable like you're you're basically over time created these different but it's it's not a perfect example eventually a better example would have been how we turn summit into more of like a virgin where we go to other entrepreneurs and say hey you know you know gary you i take it's let's say i went to gary vaynerchuk and i said garrett you don't have an experiential agency right but summit knows a lot about experiential and is well known for that why don't we joint venture i'll license this new entity the summit name and you're you're you'll spin up a company that runs it because you're better than us running an agency and we'll just take five percent of revenue in exchange for our name and we'll we'll source deals for you and you know we'll help get this thing started with you yeah but if five gary get vaynerchuk i would say fuck you i don't want that summit name i'm a do it on my own and keep one hundred percent why what's preventing anyone from doing that so gary's is probably not a great example because he's so well known and he could do that but you know say that you're just like a small like design agency like you're really good at running you know a web design agency but you have this thought like wow imagine if i could build an experiential agency like maybe you have a client like maybe one of your clients is you know hbo you're designing like you know websites for their new shows and hbo comes to you and says like you've done a great job we we wish you could do something for our south by southwest you know festival and we have a ten million dollar budget to build like a pop up experience there and you you know normally you just recommend that to your friend's agency that does experiential you could come like we could come you and say look we'll help you figure out how to build that experiential agency because we know a lot experiential and we have you know thousands of clients like hustle has a lot of followers who believe in hustle take our brand and leverage our brand to build an an experiential agency it's this is essentially what virgin does so like virgin will go to i got take take virgin news new cruise company so virgin will go take this a former ceo of a major cruise line like i think their ceo from disney cruises and say look like we have a we have this huge brand and following people who understand what the virgin brand means and wanna go on virgin products whether that's an airline or a balloon you know a lot more about the cruise ship industry than we know let's joint venture we'll license you the virgin brand name we'll take a percentage of revenue and in virgin case they also take branson and family office and they invest and help get the things started with their capital so like you know hustle tomorrow could spin up a private equity firm like raise a you know a fifty million dollar fund and go around and find people who wanna build like other kinds of hustle products and wanna leverage your audience like maybe you wanna build the hustle hotel chain and so like you could go to a hotel development company and say look we don't know anything about hotel development but we have this we have two million readers who understand that the hustle stands for x y and z and we've got a fifty million dollar fund we will give you the capital and we will market and we will give you our brand and we want five percent of of revenue and we also wanna own you know thirty percent of the equity and you guys build the hotels how how did you learn like someone like me i'm pretty like simple where i just think like i'm gonna make this cool thing i'm just gonna sell it and make money off of it whereas you've got all these like really interesting financing schemes how do you how important do you think that is and where do i learn about that yeah i mean i think if you google like waterfall equity waterfall that would be a really good thing to learn and you know i think there's probably i bet you if you google like you know private equity structures and study venture capital and private equity structuring our if you just call people who run private equity firms or real estate firms like this this is kinda how kind of like old school real estate entrepreneurs work like if you look at like you know companies like related group like you know big real estate firms that also own operating businesses they they generally are working around structured kind of waterfalls like i was describing a waterfall is basically a way of sharing profits and i think if you studied you know waterfall and things like that that you you could learn a bunch of this i feel like i didn't learn a lot alright let's do two more ideas what what me pull them up what what entrance are you i mean on the fun ideas i i i love i mean one crazy idea i really like is is building bernie man for the south so i know i've been to bernie man the last five years and every time i go i'm like this is basically a giant tailgate and you know i've spent some time in the south and i'm like i think people in the south actually are already much more into this kind of thing than all these crazy people from san francisco you know they already have rv much more prevalent prevalent in the south they already like to tailgate they like to make things and in and c create things and you know and and and so i think there's there's like a really cool way to build bernie man and what's a cool about burning man is you could bootstrap this business so all you need is a it's a location to host it in that's outdoors like a farm where you won't be able to disturb the neighbors with it allowed music and then you just need a bunch of camps and the genius thing about burning man is that they don't actually build almost any of what you see at burning man all they build is the they they they mark out the roads and they build a giant wooden man that they burn at the end of the week but all they've done is they built this platform it's kinda like a software company like like a platform like like salesforce or people build apps for it and so you basically would go to twenty people and convince them to build a camp and get them to sell tickets to their friends and they then bring everything and they build things that are good for the overall community alright i'm looking at bernie man's a nonprofit which means it's all public how much i'll tell you but yes how much revenue do you think they make well they're doing about seventy thousand tickets times like four hundred bucks so i don't know you tell me forty five million dollars in revenue and then it's a non profit they about breakeven yeah i mean they break even because they do a lot of awesome stuff all around the world that's not involving bernie like the the thing you think of as burning man you know they do like regional events all throughout the year but i think there's a way to build you know at least a twenty thirty percent margin and build kind of a new way of doing a a festival or an event where you get the people in their community to build awesome things like art or to build a really delicious you know barbecue that they're gonna give away and everyone just hangs out together like kind of like a giant tailgate my issue with that is i think a lot of people don't like most events are wildly unprofitable and so hard to do it's so stressful it's so hard you should only do it if you are like either a really good operator or you have meaning besides money for doing it yeah i you're definitely right it's death by a thousand cuts and events if you don't operate everything very efficiently and you can easily lose money on them but on the other hand you know i i ran an event company that nearly thirty percent margin produced produce three hundred conferences year so it's it's totally doable alright let's do one more let's hear which one interests you the most i if obviously we're we're gonna have to have you back because sean gonna wanna geek out and right now i'm looking at this document that ryan has it's got like it's like thirty pages long yeah i i i have an idea journal kinda like sean does and every time i have an idea of whether it's crazy or whatever i just write it down and so i've been doing that for like a decade so i another one that i've always really liked again sorry to keep picking on a venn ideas but i love the idea of building the a new westminster dog show but for rescue dogs only oh yeah you told me about that and i just i think it be like a a huge marketing coup because you could basically launch you know six months before the event and say everybody who has an adorable rescue dog that can do something clever send us you know a little video and you could create like an amazing you know instagram and account and start building the buzz and say that you know hey we're gonna pick the top one hundred videos and your dog is gonna be on display and be a part of this event and of course you could partner with all the you know the nonprofit and the asp c that want to promote the idea of rescuing a dog and you could sell you know i think tens and tens of thousands of tickets to the to the event who owns westminster or dog show i think it's the like isn't it like like the american kennel club is i'm assuming that's like a trade association nonprofit are you sure no i'm i'm kinda guessing what's it called the a k what's that thing called ak ak let's find out that's crazy oh my god the american kennel club has over a hundred million in revenue yeah it's it's i mean it's basically like building a giant trade show because not only could you and i love trade shows they're they're they're like usually like fifty sixty percent margin businesses and scale and have huge barriers to entry because not only it's kinda or it's kinda like comic con you know once you have the dogs that are like the attraction but then all around the place where you're hosting that event and filming it you would have a huge exhibit hall where you'd have like you know chewy and every dog product on the market that's trying to promote their you know their their items and so i i just think it's a really fun heartwarming and profitable idea god that's crazy and there would have thought that this would be that big let's look it up so i love so like there's this whole there's like a whole bunch of profits and i don't know anything about that world that are like there should be let maybe i mean i don't know the pros and cons of profit versus non nonprofit but all non nonprofit have to reveal their there's their their their numbers so you know that they're you know not making sick or they're reinvest their profits so american kennel association hold my gosh yeah this is a huge it's huge i'd never would've have thought that in a million years yeah and sam did you know that trade associations which are non nonprofit like this i have been known to sell their trade shows to four prop it so like there's a company in washington dc that's a really big company called han wood that business yeah i know those guys they were they're a b b publisher yeah so like i think they bought like i'm i'm forgetting the one but maybe like concrete world and they would just they would go to like the you know the home builders trade association that has like you know whatever a hundred thousand home builder members that has some big trade show and because they're not nonprofit you know they don't really run it as efficiently or as as well or as creatively as they could and they would buy that trade show and just be a lot more you know creative with it and and grow it han wood and at han wood so what han wood was is they owned publications for like concrete workers and they drew these trade shows they were sold for close to of four hundred million dollars and they had six or seventy million in revenue with thirty five million in eb yeah and the the the guy was ceo is now doing again he's that government executive which is basically gonna do the same thing for government workers and government you know contractors publishing and trade joe why would he ever name his company government executive that's what it's called well it's actually been around for forever and and and it was acquired by the investment banker or the investment banker who sold helped me sell biz started a private equity firm and he and the guy used to be ceo henry wood bought government an executive and are now just improving it alright ryan thank you this is sick how do people how should they contact you i i i showed ryan yesterday how to use twitter so i don't know if he's gonna do a good job at that but how else could people reach you yeah so just because of you i threw up a website ryan bi dot com not the easiest name to spell but i'm sure they can google you know ryan bi dot com b e g e l m man ryan bi dot com and you can find my email on there ryan at ryan b dot com and at hit me up and you know look the thing i'm really interested is if if anyone out there got a company that doing you know three hundred thousand to three million in profit it might be a company i'd love to partner with you on or acquire and i'm also really interested in building new companies around newsletters podcast podcasts webinars digital events online courses mastermind and anything else that's community content or experiential so if you're interested in any of that kind of stuff and you just wanna geek out about it shoot me an email what kind of companies are you looking to buy ryan i mean really i'm actually pretty open minded to all kinds of things but they have to be at least three hundred thousand in profit for they've gotta be around for at least two or three years and i'm looking for you know frankly they don't even have to be high growing and it'd be a little bit better if they were you know in something related to content education you know online communities something about nature because i obviously know those businesses better you know events etcetera but frankly i'm open to almost anything at the moment who made this website so cute i made that just like in an hour just the other day while having dinner on what platform squarespace it's like the cutest website i've ever seen yeah i'm not savvy like you on i pretty much never open twitter facebook or instagram but because of you i'm gonna start to try to check on on my twitter feet at least that's awesome well brian thank you this is awesome and and podcast has ended bye you guys