A Million-Dollar Rope Course Adventure Park in the middle of nowhere?

0:00Hey, Michael here. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Today, we did a deal that was listener submitted. And that's just an invite. If you have a deal that you went across that you want us to talk about, send it to us. We'll do it. And this one was a fun one. Heather and I talked about it out in rural Colorado. And I'll tell you what, it was kind of surprising because, well, well, stay tuned and see how it turned out. So here's the deal.

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1:06They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step. So don't wait to make your business ownership dream a reality. Visit acquisitionlab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. Heather, are you sad or happy about the NBA finals last night? Do you care? I'm unaware. I can't even be sad or happy. It's a really interesting NBA finals because all of the big market teams have lost. So we're left with Indianapolis versus Oklahoma City. Oh, sorry. All right. When I say it, I'm just like, I could just feel like any of the media people being like, we couldn't get, you know, you want New York, Chicago, Texas, California, Florida.

1:51LA. Yeah, LA, either LA team, like that's what you want. And you end up with Oklahoma City and, and, you know, they got to get their chance, right? It turned out to be a great game. I mean, both teams are really good. The team that won only led for 0.3 seconds of the game. Wow. That's the thing I understand about baseball, basketball is you've just got to watch it at the end. Yeah, it's terrific. Yeah, I was playing online chess for the first three quarters. and then I was like, okay, well, let's watch the game now. Speaking of adventure, I brought a deal today that was submitted by a listener and let me give the listener credit because I love it when listeners submit deals.

2:30It's Tyler Peterson who's located in Colorado and he sent us this deal because it's actually near his house and he says it's fun. So I pulled it up and it looks pretty cool. It does look pretty cool. So let me read it to you and then let's see what we think. Okay, don't miss. is this amazing aerial ropes course adventure park in bailey colorado and the picture here it looks like what are these people doing heather well it's like they're on a little uh bridge they've got safety gear on and they're on zip lines and you know all that kind of fun obstacle kind of stuff yeah so it's like an aerial deal where people are walking on wires and tied to harnesses and stuff like that and they're outdoors and here's a shot of the bathrooms terrific and It's a yurt.

3:17There's a yurt. They have a yurt too. Oh, a yurt. Yes. Sign me up. I didn't know there would be a yurt involved. Yeah. All right. So, okay. So it's an aerial adventure park. Rope scores. So they're asking$1.3 million,$1.35 million. There's no cash flow disclosed. No revenue disclosed. No real estate disclosed. And EBITDA is not disclosed. It was established in 2018. This rope adventure park is truly one of the best in the industry and located just outside of Bailey, Colorado. Do we know where Bailey, Colorado is? I do not know where that is at all. Should we take a detour and figure out where Bailey, Colorado is?

3:52Yeah, let's go to Bailey. We need to know. I would imagine a suburb of Denver, or is it? No, no. It's southwest of Denver, northwest of Colorado Springs. So you are way up in the mountains here. So it looks like you go, okay, here's I-70, and then you go southwest down federal highway 285 past red rocks and that's where it is out there yeah yeah okay so that i think that's a key factor here this thing is in the middle of nowhere okay this rope adventure park is truly one of the best in the industry and located just outside of bailey colorado all top of the line from the design of the equipment into the setting it has a unique aerial and rope course property it's built in 2018 on 12 commercial acres and is located just outside of bailey colorado it's a great investment opportunity and has an aerial park and ropes course all equipments included it's top of the line design and additional recreational amenities for added value uh it has 13 employees a 916 square foot uh building the real estate is owned and it has restrooms and an office yurt office yurt i i need one in the backyard i think yeah i had a friend in california who is i worked with him in tech and he was super smart guy, Harvard MBA.

5:10He came in one day, he's like, yo, I think I'm going to become a yurt dealer. And I was like, what? I was like, you're a product manager for an enterprise software company. Why do you want to sell yurts? He's like, I think there's a big future in yurts. I was like, okay, bro. It's like plastics. Okay. Well, I've been to one of these, I've been to one of these aerial parks. It was a long time ago. It was a corporate retreat. And I imagine that's what, you know, that's a lot of the revenue from a place like this. And my memory of it was I don't like to do things that are for the first time in front of a crowd.

5:46And so everybody went on a hike and I waited till everybody went on a hike to try to climb this big like telephone pole that you climbed up and you're supposed to stand on it at the top. You had safety gear and then jump off. And I was just getting to the top when the entire hike came back. And then they were, it was nice because they were cheering me on, but it made me really nervous. And I did not want to be doing that in front of a bunch of people. But it was cool. It was a fun event. Had all this kind of activities and things for the bank that I worked for at the time to kind of do together.

6:18And it was up in the mountains like this. It was up in the Los Angeles National Forest, kind of out of town. Hey, everyone. It's Bill. And I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod. It's called Capital Pad and it is the thing that I wish existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So Capital Pad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs, that is people who want to buy a business and need capital to list their deals and solicit capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition deals. So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is the place to do it.

7:00And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors. So the really great thing too from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions, all up front in black and white. Basically, Capital Pad professionalizes investing in small businesses. And the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right.

7:36So if this sounds like something that's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out CapitalPad.com and tell them that Acquisitions anonymous sent you but it's kind of it's it's a genius activity for companies if you're trying to get people to kind of bond together as human beings because one way to do that is if you get them feeling like stressors and endorphins um they come out the other side kind of feeling stronger as a team so this is a way of artificially creating that because you're asking people to walk across stuff and look i am i am the first one to tell you i am terrified of heights terrified of my family thinks it's hilarious.

8:17Like I won't, I won't do it. And, but it's true, like your endorphins, your heart rate, everything, your juices get flowing when you do something like this. So I love that aspect of people using these as, you know, adventure retreats and team building. Yeah. But this one is way out there. So I guess you would draw, you know, the businesses that are in and around Denver, but this is a full day outing because this is a pretty long drive out there. Yeah. Like I think that's my fundamental question with this. And we don't know gross revenue. We don't know EBITDA. We don't know what they want for the real estate.

8:46We know it's been around for seven years. So that's probably a good sign. They didn't go out of business in there for seven years, or maybe they're about to go out of business. We don't know because we don't have any numbers. You know, that's my first question about this. You're out in the middle of nowhere. Like, how do you get people to come from Denver out to this place? Like, what's the draw that you would do this as opposed to going to one of these that's closer into town? Because there's lots of forests that are much closer to Denver than this. And no real estate. I mean, they're not even telling us if they own the real estate.

9:12So did they just put all of this on leased land and what's the situation with the lease? Where did you even come up with a million 350? It feels like that's their cost. This is a basis bias as Connor Gross likes to say. Yeah, or also the, I won't be embarrassed if I sell it for this price. I go three price, I think. Well, I guess the first, you know, there's kind of two issues about this. There's this particular deal, which I guess we'd love to look at the numbers, but they didn't give us any in this listing. But then there's also, I guess the question is, do you want to be in this business? Like, like this particular business, like, as you think about it from a first principles, Porter's five forces standpoint, like, do you want to own this business or not?

10:00I mean, I think there's a lot of marketing involved, right? You've got to, you've got to be found, right? Whoever's planning these outings and maybe consumers as well, you've got to do a lot of marketing to be seen. And this is, you know, there's danger here. Why are endorphins going up? Because it's a little bit dangerous and so people could get hurt. So there's probably a lot of liability insurance costs. You know, it's probably not usable in the winter, very seasonal, probably just a you know summertime kind of activity I don't know that I would want to be in this business maybe if it's complementary to some other business I'm in on the winter season in that area perhaps and I've already got you know the the marketing visibility to the type of clients that I need and and this is just a complementary business but as a standalone business I don't know that I'd want to be in this yeah where I've seen these more is when they're yeah, complement to other stuff.

10:58So we have like Andretti's kind of indoor race cart facilities here. They have a ropes course that they use their area above the cars and stuff like for this type stuff and above the video games. That's where they make sense. You know, I've seen these also just as an amenity as part of a resort type environment where you can get people to spend more. But it just seems like a tough business. You're asking people to come out to do something that's probably a once in a lifetime thing for them. They got to drive two hours. They're not going to pay a bunch of money because you look at half these pictures, they're kids and parents.

11:28And then if you do ever get to a point where you're going to be making real money, somebody's going to build one of these right next to you because there's just so much land in Bailey. You know, based on what we saw, there's a whole bunch of nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Probably was a fun hobby idea. Yeah. That's what I think. I think some rich person built this and was like, you know, it'd be great. We can get people out here. We'll get the grandkids out here. We can build a ropes course on that land we own and people will just come and i'm willing to bet except for i actually i'll give you one final thing before we close on this one i'd be willing to bet that these people in these very professional photos that they have here are the owner's relatives perhaps yeah because they're very staged photos and yeah very could be like here the grant this young lady and there's like a kid young lady and then they look like this lady who's the mom's age like they look like they're genetically like this looks like her real daughter in real life look at her face like exactly the same and there's there's the owner's wife yep yep she's hardcore yeah they enjoy it uh they just couldn't get enough people other people to come out there to enjoy it maybe.

12:43Cool. All right. So where are you on this one? Thumbs down. Sorry. Yeah. Thumbs down from the micster. So I agree with that. And then just a mad shout out to, uh, to Ryan or Tyler Peterson, who sent this to us. Uh, if you have deals that you run across, you want us to do on the podcast, please send them. And if you enjoyed this podcast, we're experimenting with trying kind of a shorter format where we get to the point more quickly. Uh, if you like that, let us know if you hate it and want to go back to us, just kind of BSing for 30 minutes in lecturing each other. We can do that. We can do that.

13:13Don't tempt us. Don't tempt us with a good time. All right. Let us know what you think and we'll see you all next time. Thanks.