Would You Buy a $3.3M Taxidermy Company?

0:00Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Michael here. Today's episode was super fun. Mills and I did actually a taxidermy business in Reno, which I insisted we do because we've never done one before. After 500 odd episodes, we've never done taxidermy. And I was just fascinated by the whole thing. Stick around to the end. You'll see what we thought about it. And here's the episode. We'll set Acquisitions Anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We don't have 100 % beers anymore. Thumbs down on just the plus inventory. Are you ready to take a leap into business ownership, but you don't know where to start?

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1:05So 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. All right. Everybody's live. We're optimizing for entertainment just so that everybody knows. And so we're like, is there a lot to talk about on this deal versus another one? I don't know. and michael just teased me that this is going to be amazing i know we've never done one of these before so it's pretty straightforward so uh it may be because a business like this has never sold before or been listed before um yeah i mean i thought your your mind would be blown on this so this is on that picture you have to stop what you're doing and get on youtube right now uh it's pretty unbelievable this looks like something that would be in like a museum.

1:58Pretty much, yeah. What is this? It's like an axis deer, it looks like, staring up into space and then there is a leopard flying in and they both appear to be stuffed animals. And not plushy toys, stuffed animals. These are taxidermied animals. Yeah, so that's this deal. Let me read it to you. It's a premier taxidermy for sale, located in Reno, Nevada, Washoe County. The asking price is$1.6 million. They do not talk about profitability, which is kind of like, I wish they had talked about profitability. You know why though? It's probably because they have like 90 % of that margin. They're like, we're not putting this out there.

2:44Let's see if they tell us more. Gross revenue is$3.3 million. That's a lot of animals get stuffed. Yeah. All right, business description. The company is a longstanding specialized production firm known for handling highly detailed custom projects for a diverse range of clients. With decades of operating history, it has built a strong reputation for its niche for precision workmanship, reliable turnaround times, and technical expertise that is difficult to replicate. Its services are consistently sought by individuals and organizations nationwide, supported by a steady mix of new and repeat customers.

3:18operations are conducted in a fully equipped facility with a trained team capable of managing complex hands-on production processes from start to finish they have established systems quality controls and experienced staff ensure constant that output and high customer satisfaction ownership is preparing for retirement is what to provide a smooth transition period for a new owner this opportunity is well suited for a buyer seeking a niche established production business with a strong brand recognition and a loyal customer base. Okay, do we have a moment for a rant? This summary is such a disappointment.

3:52I could not write two paragraphs that said less than these two paragraphs do. There's nothing in here. There's no numbers. There's no specifics. Literally, you could have written this about any business. You could have written this about a mortuary, and it'd be like, yep, that's exactly what they do. Sounds about right, yeah. Sounds right. Oh, you install mufflers on high-performance automobiles? Yep, that's exactly what they do. Denise seems like a very nice lady based on her photo. She's the broker. But literally, this thing says absolutely nothing. Nothing about the business. Well, and it's interesting because the website is very generic too.

4:28It's M &A Business Advisors is the group that she's with. And it seems like this is definitely a target market for them. If you look at businesses for sale and you go to that market, all it does is give you the list of advisors, which they all look very nice and very professional. And then when you go to her page, it doesn't even have a list of the businesses that she's selling. Yeah. And I know these business brokers are not motivated to find more buyers, right? The consistent problem with being a business broker these days is finding good deals and then getting them done. But it's almost like these guys are keeping them a secret.

5:14Yeah, they really are. It says call our office to find out what's for sale. I'm wondering, though, but we found it on Biz by Sell. So I'm going to go to her Biz by Sell profile. Okay. She has two on there. a custom slab fabrication business with real estate available in Reno, which I think is like slabs of marble. And then this taxidermy business. Is the custom... Okay, I'm going to pull the custom slab. Is this... Holy shit, dude. It's the same two paragraphs. Word for word. No, it's almost identical. Yeah, see that. Predict for a team capable of managing the company's core functions yeah and like let me guess the owner wants to retire yeah it's basically just the same word salad uh and at least at least in this other one they do disclose the sde but i mean how you think about it this way like if we invert this how little do you have to say that is unique to this listing to like make it completely jump off the page it is an amazing business that does something that's so unique say like two things say like the average order value or like that you've done it for you know celebrities that you can't disclose like you can say little nuggets of things without really like disclosing anything company specific and you would immediately like blow the socks off people it's just such low effort now it makes me wonder is the seller doing this is the seller making them stay so vague i don't know it seems like their other listing is vague and then their website basically doesn't tell you anything about even the businesses for sale.

6:56So no. And this firm has a ton of brokers. Like you would think that they, you know, actually are trying, they want, they want you to register as a buyer to kind of pre-qualify. And it is, if you go back to their website, I mean, this is, it's probably 30 questions that they want you to answer and most of them are required buyer oh this is it i click on this buyer registration registration yeah man this is a big firm they've got offices all over the west yeah but then isn't it funny like this is such a like lower uh like main street list of questions are you currently employed like you could have sold a business you know and have a hundred million dollars in liquidity and you're like no, I'm not employed.

7:45And they probably like, won't qualify you. Oh man. When I was doing low, lower middle market work, uh, we would, you know, a lot of times we would try and cover like more mainstream business brokers. Cause you just never know, like maybe you'll get a diamond in the rough and like these, you know, when you're, when you're used to working with like a, a traditional investment bank that works in the lower middle market, like they know about confidentiality. They are not asking you for crazy stuff. They know that you don't have proof of funds. Plenty of people in this segment of the market will ask for proof of funds.

8:22They want you to send a screenshot of your bank account. Well, a fund is never going to provide proof of funds. It just doesn't work that way. But you would get people who are like, send me a copy of your driver's license. And it's like, I'm in South Carolina. I'm looking at a business in California. I don't think my driver's license is going to help you. And I'm not giving you my social security numbers. Wow. And I mean, the interesting thing about this website is somebody has clearly spent some money on SEO because you see all this stuff here. All the tag words. Yeah. Yeah. There's somebody has spent a lot of money on that.

8:56There's here you look at all these blog posts, selling my business in Los Angeles, what every owner should know. And this is totally AI LLM like SEO. Somebody's put some effort into this. It's just fascinating that they just don't put the effort into actually saying anything about the businesses. I mean, especially because the business itself is like anything but disappointing. It seems epic. Yeah. And I pulled it up basically because I was just so excited by the title. And then you open it up, you're like, oh, this is like, you're not really trying it. So, well, from a first principle standpoint, do I want to be in the tech?

9:32Well, okay, let's step back. Some people may not know what taxidermy is because some of us don't go out on the weekend like yourself and shoot bambi so what is what does what does taxidermy do you're just saying that because i have a beard yeah um so taxidermy like obviously the picture that's up here uh of this leopard and this like exotic uh deer somebody spent a lot of money like traveling to a foreign country in order to hunt these things. They spent a lot of money on like special draw hunt permits and licenses to be able to hunt these animals. And a lot of these animals are like cultivated on Texas is like blowing up with these exotic, uh, animal hunts where these properties will on hundreds and thousands of acres, they'll put up high fences, like 20 foot tall fences, and they'll raise exotic animals there so that you can go hunt.

10:31Like, I don't, I've never heard of anybody like killing an elephant in Texas, but there's some other kind of crazy exotic species that, uh, of course go big or go home. It's Texas, but it saves you the trip. You know, like you don't have to go to Africa. You don't have to go to Southeast Asia to hunt something like this. So that's the backdrop. You spend all this money, whether you're doing it, you know, domestically or abroad to kill one of these animals. And then people will spend definitely more than tens of thousands of dollars getting taxidermy done on something like this to put it like in their trophy room.

11:07And I mean, that is a tale as old as time. Like people have been doing that kind of thing for thousands of years. Have you ever been to somebody's house where they have like a 7 ,000 square foot house? And then there's just like stuff like this picture, right? where there's a leopard and I've been in a guy's house that has a room that is thousands of square feet, several thousand square feet that has over a million dollars worth of taxidermy in it, like full-size bears upright, you know, like massive, massive animals that have all been, you know, stuffed. And I don't know though, like, I'm curious, is this, this is probably a bad example, but is this like a tattoo artist where you're like, I, you know, I don't have any tattoos, but like, I have a tattoo artist.

11:54They do all my work. Like, I don't care if they move to another city. I'm following their, like them there to go get another tattoo years later. Is a taxidermy person the one, like, are you kind of like, look, I don't care whether I killed like a duck or a leopard, but like, I have a guy, he does all my work. Uh, I mean, this seems to indicate and given this amount of taxidermy, they have to have a team doing it. It talks about that here in the word salad. Operations are conducted in a fully equipped facility with a trained team capable of managing complex hands-on production processes from start to finish.

12:27That could be either the description of this business or your local Taco Bell, like one of the two. It's a handcrafted team. I would think at this level of revenue, right, as$3.3 million, This has got to be more than one person can do, even at like a very, very high average order value for something like this. So I do think it's probably multiple people. And it's probably one of those things where it's like the singular kind of famous artist expert with a lot of helpers. Cause this is like a very, I mean, you, somebody is bringing you an animal on ice and you are then breaking down this animal into something that now cannot be like spoiled so that it can be stuffed permanently.

13:14And people are very specific about what they want. This picture is an amazing example. People don't just get like the leopard, you know, like looking like a little cat and like licking its paw. This leopard is like about to just claw this deer to death. And somehow they have it flying through the air. So there's some kind of metal thing holding it all up, which to me is like, wow, that's an art. I did Google, well, I didn't Google it. I asked Claude, what are typical prices for taxidermy? And I said, well, give me the prices for like a deer or a bear. And there are multiple variations of the mounting.

13:52So you can do what's called a shoulder mount, which I don't understand. Then there's the European mount, which is I guess the one where they just chop off the head and it's a skull and antlers only. And the full body mount can be$3 ,000 to$8 ,000 for a deer if it's like a full deer. And then for bears are probably like a third more expensive than that. A full body mount could be$10 ,000 plus with large bears like the grizzly or brown bear reaching the higher end. Yeah, so I think, you know, let's just say even if they're crazy expensive and their average order value is$20 ,000, This is still a lot of actual projects going on on any given year.

14:30And I do think it's multiple people. I love, you know, I mean, this is just like the most generic description ever. So I don't really trust anything that they're saying, but at least they're not like, you know, it's a relocatable business. I'm curious about the location being Reno. Like, is there something about the clientele close to Las Vegas like that lends itself to this business in that location? I'm just not sure. Let me ask Claude, why would you put a taxidermy business in Reno, Nevada? I'll let it work on that. Well, I mean, I think the first thing is to be proximity to money is what I think.

15:07According to Claude, it makes a ton of sense. There's a huge amount of hunting and fishing demand. We haven't talked about fish yet. It sits as, Reno sits at the gateway to a lot of that country. It also hits very close to the Sierra and California's Eastern hunting zone. So you're pulling customers from two states. There's a lot of trophy quality game that Nevada is known for, including mule deer and trophy bighorn sheep tags. Exactly the kind of animals people pay to mount rather than just process. Trophy hunters are the bread and butter of profitable taxidermy. And then, as I said before, proximity to wealthy clients, tourists and out-of-state hunters, and a good business climate.

15:46And there's less competition relative to demand. It feels like other areas like Southern California and Northern California would be much more kind of overbuilt. And interestingly enough, dry climates are actually good for hide work. And it peaks seasonally, peaking after the fall hunting season. So cash flow management matters. Claude wants to know, let me give you this, are you thinking about this as a potential business or acquisition? Hell no. So, wow, Michael, you really jumped the gun on the thumbs up, thumbs down thing here. Before we come back, let's talk about this. This is a good business you want to be in or not.

16:27So, if I buy this, what am I buying here? I mean, you have to be an artist. This is an artist-centered business. And at this size, you're not the only person who's performing the work. This isn't just like a solo operation, a one man or one woman show, but you've got to manage like a team of artists. And if people are spending this much on this, like it's going to be very specific and very demanding. Like if you accidentally, you know, mount this thing wrong or, you know, you mess up. And I think there's a lot of like touching up and kind of things like that that happen in this process. But I don't know.

17:08It just seems like it's very finicky and very high stakes. 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.

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18:24So 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 you gotta imagine it's easy to screw this up there's also you know if you buy this business like you're hopefully buying a team that knows how to do these things as i've been doing them for decades i gotta imagine also like most blue collar type jobs like this the the number of young people who are coming into this industry is not very high so i think labor is something you're also buying here this trained team is probably a big chunk of it but i think you're also buying the customer relationships there you know there's it's like having bicycles or boats or vacation homes for these people you know how many how many uh how many taxidermy stuffed bears should you have well however many you have plus one that's basically the right answer to that that's the algorithm they all have uh and so i bet repeat client is a huge deal for these guys I did just look up other taxidermy sites for sale.

19:32And the next one that comes up is a$249 ,000 listing that is now off market, but it was in Ridgeway, Missouri. And it's like an 1 ,800 square foot space. They don't provide any revenue info or anything. But it just seems like these are very few and far between. This other one is basically being sold as a piece of real estate, and you get the business along with it. I kind of wonder what made this one so big. I did the math, and if you say an average deal size is$7 ,000, they're doing about 500 animals a year, which is not small. They've created an interesting market. And this picture that they show here may be kind of the giveaway, which is like, perhaps this is like really high end complex stuff for the people who are paying 10, 15, 25 ,000 to have art created for them.

20:33Yeah. It makes me wonder if that's the niche for this business. It's interesting in, in searching too. There's another person who had listed their business for sale like a few years ago on like hunting chat.net, you know, and they're trying to sell their, uh, established taxidermy business. Um, this is a very old listing. Um, and it looks like he's, you know, he was looking for$29 ,995. But one of the things he mentions that's kind of interesting is work in progress, which we haven't talked about, but, you know, everything that this person is working on right now, they've probably received deposits on.

21:14Um, and there's an expectation from the clientele that like, you know, Fred is the one who is like the face and the name of this business and probably like the iconic person who's working on it. You've got to figure out like, what is the working capital? Like, what is the transition and customer relationships? Like for something like this? Um, there's a lot of different, I didn't even think about the work in progress component because these things don't happen overnight. They take a while. Uh, and it's gotta be the case that you're taking deposits. So there's a whole working capital type thing.

21:44It's very easy for businesses like this to be behind on cash flow and working off customer deposits, borrowing against future revenue, if that makes sense, that they haven't worked on yet. But again, I come back to this. All these other ones you list are small, random Jimmy in a little rented space. These guys are doing nearly$3.5 million of taxidermy in Reno. It's like, what's going on? That's a lot. It's a lot. I just keep looking now at how few taxidermy businesses there are for sale. So you're also buying that. I mean, there's just not a lot of competition. It's not necessarily easy to start one of these up.

22:32If somebody goes all the way to Africa and spends$75 ,000 or$100 ,000 on a hunt, and I think you've heard some of the stories about some of those hunts where they find the animal, the zebra, and there's two guys nudging it out into the field and you pull up your gun and shoot it. That's the way some of those hunts go. It's a real sport. And then you come back to the US, you're not going to trust that carcass to just a random somebody. You're going to drop$10 ,000,$15 ,000,$20 ,000 to get an artist to do it, which that's pretty tough to copy. You got to like that about this deal. So I've got an interesting thing that just came up.

23:12I'm going to switch and share my screen. I'm going to take over. Oh, we have an audio visual component to this podcast? This is ridiculous. So look at this, Michael. I found this when I was looking, but this is called First Class Trophy Taxidermy and Logistics. And what just came up is this is a business that was founded in 2008. and they've uh since their start they've grown to be the largest taxidermy company in europe their headquarters is located in denmark and they're represented in sweden germany plus we have admin support through south africa and namibia they have like what looks like a really nice four minute long youtube video that i'm not going to play because there were animal sounds that started right away but what's interesting is they are looking for it's not quite like a franchise model but they are looking for partners in all these other countries to grow and kind of leverage the leverage the the brand that this company has but then have people kind of you know on on the ground so to speak in all these different places and like look at these brochures i mean this looks like really well done there's like pricing um i wonder if there's trophy so this is like you you can go partner with the hunting guides to become an affiliate and stuff like that it's really good okay so here we go 50 deposit when they confirm your order uh here's the routing number and everything uh for sweden um priceless for mammals here we go whoa oh my goodness this is amazing baboons bears of certain sizes wow this is so cool bush pigs beavers buffaloes So the most expensive thing on the list is a bison, and this has got to be in euros.

24:59So just doing a shoulder mount bison is 1 ,540 euros. Okay. So that's where they just basically chop it off at the shoulders, mount it up. That's cheaper than I thought. But like full mounts? So like a full mount of a European moose is 9 ,800 euros. Wow. This is fascinating. All right. So who should do this deal? golly the sample size gets so small i think it's like it's somebody who really loves hunting who's already in the las vegas or reno area who i don't i don't know i mean is are they going to run this business the same way this person has probably not like that's a really really difficult person to find like they have to have enough money to buy the business they have to be hands-on and detail oriented enough and be willing to spend like a lot of hours running this business um and they also probably have to be in the right geography and i don't know it just seems like it's a really really difficult like for the stars to align on this yeah because you're i mean you got to be somebody who wants to be in this community and that's all i can think about you want to be in the hunting community you want to be in the online forums what did you say the name of it was like bambikiller.net what was the name of the hunting forum huntingchat.net

26:26I got taken to hunt when I was a little kid by a relative and we're out and they wake me up at like 5am you go sit in a deer blind and an hour in I'm like let's not kill Bambi why are we going to shoot Bambi and then an hour in I was like can we shoot a deer now this is so boring because we were just sitting there. Can we shoot a deer so we can go inside? This is so boring because it's 1981. There's just not much going on. Okay, so we think this deal needs somebody who's a hunting nerd and has money and wants to get their hands dirty with all this stuff. And you've got to be working channels, working SEO.

27:06It's almost like a unicorn to find this person. I don't know how you do it. I mean, I know a lot of people who like hunting who, you know, they, they intentionally are like, I like taking my deer to a processor so that I am not like having to do like all the butchering and the processing and like turning all this into, you know, like the meat that my family's going to eat. So this just seems like an even more niche subset of that. I think this has got to be up there in terms of like some of the most highly fragmented businesses. Like nobody from South Carolina just kills like a regular deer in South Carolina and takes this, you know, takes their deer to Nevada.

27:45So I think the geographic constraints of this are also something that like, I don't know, there's just a lot of questions I have and, and the broker did not even like hint at answering this. There's a lot of questions I have that would have been nice to have been discussed in the listing if they took three minutes preparing it as opposed to cut and paste from chat GPT. I just think, you know, I get it. Like as a broker, you've got, you know, a lot of tire kickers and like a lot of like buyers to sift through, but like there's better ways to do it. Like put some information out there, help yourself.

28:20This, this is like a self-fulfilling cycle for them. They get more and more frustrated at the buyers that they get and like the questions they ask, but you're kind of self-selecting for that. I think with this. Yeah. I don't know. the more the more we do this podcast where i'm like never i would never do that job just seems so hard yeah i don't know how this seems and i know people that love it but it just seems so brutal whatever all right so um well based on what we know which is pretty limited uh do you call and get the sim on this one i would be just very curious to talk to the broker and figure out like, are they just totally blowing off all the buyers?

29:03You know, like, are they just annoyed that you've even reached out? And then I would be really curious to know, like, okay, maybe it takes you 30 minutes worth of time to fill out an NDA, have a call with this person, actually like that I'm a serious buyer and get the information. I think this is worth spending 30 minutes on to actually see what's going on in this business. But I think it's going to only prove what we're speculating, which is this is an inherently really difficult business to transact. And it's a very difficult business to run in transition. But look, I know lots of people that have walked into business situations like this where first principles wise, you think it should be a crappy business.

29:42And then they see that there's some reason that it hasn't been bought yet. And they realize they can fix that or address that or work around it or that everybody's just wrong. And I have friends that have done that kind of stuff. So that's where I think, yeah, it's worth giving it a call because the story here kind of makes sense. The listing's not good. It's not SEO optimized at all. The brokers don't appear to be really trying. So maybe there is something that we're all missing. The listing is incomplete. Maybe there's something here and everybody else is looking at it like we are and being like, this is terrible, and then walking away.