255 - How He Turned a $150K Into a Million-Dollar Wedding Venue & 5 Coffee Shops with Alex Nelson

0:00We ended up at almost 100 weddings booked before we finished construction. They're booked 80 % of the time. We know what the rate is. We'll find some vendors. How hard could it be? Easy peasy. We'll do 77 weddings this year, so we'll do over a million this year. Dude, you're blowing my mind. So the coffee shop's$2 million top line. The wedding venue, a little bit over a million top line. How big is your wife's baby boutique business? We actually don't have our SBA loan anymore either. What are the best pieces of advice that you would give to somebody who's getting started? What is the best way to start in their market?

0:35Alex Nelson, the wedding venue guy. I am so glad to have you back. You're one of my first guests. And the conversation that we had was amazing. We talked about, obviously, you launching your wedding venue in the middle of Iowa and it doing exceptionally well. You had no experience in it. But since that time, you have not only had the wedding venue that's done really well, you've sounds like you've opened up a smattering of businesses. You bought some coffee shops. I know you sold a course at one point. Your wife has opened like a baby boutique. You're potentially looking at opening another venue.

1:07You're a mogul now. I think you've graduated from entrepreneur to mogul. Would you agree? No, definitely not. We've done a lot since and definitely have learned a lot. So I think people are really interested in the wedding venue. And this is one of my first episodes. So if you want to go listen to the whole thing, you can go back. I'll have to actually look at the episode and put it in the show notes, but you can go listen to the whole thing. But I want you to just walk through like, what is a wedding venue first and then sort of the economics of it? So how did you hear about wedding menus? How did you get into the space?

1:37Yeah. So my wife and I, we were pretty much customers or clients, you know, before, and that's essentially how we figured it out. I mean, it was definitely not a top of mind for me, but for my wife, definitely. We had been together since like high school and then we were together all through college like after college we knew we were going to get engaged pretty quick and probably married soon after that so we like ended up touring and looking at these venues like before we even got engaged like we got our parents involved and stuff and it was like a whole thing we ended up booking a venue before we were engaged i mean didn't really tell anybody and then we got like engaged soon after which might sound crazy but it honestly happens all the time at our venue now so that was kind of like light bulb moment there is like that's how we really learned like what these wedding venues were of course like i'd been to weddings and whatnot but like they could be at hotels they could be wherever this is like we were wearing like the true like standalone like wedding venues and i would say they're rather new-ish industry still like 10-15 years probably like standalone standalone venues like basically yeah people used to get married in a church and then you just go to any sort of reception hall hotel event hall whatever and then it kind of like evolved to like people getting married in church less and less so like they got they're trying to find more creative places to do the ceremony and then like these barn venues started popping up where you could do the ceremony reception everything all kind of in one and that's just really like evolved from there you weren't technically engaged yet but you went and found a wedding venue you booked it yourselves that was your first experience how long was the wait so between booking it and your wedding date how much time was there six months no like a year and a half maybe holy balls that's a long time yeah yeah was that normal did you pick a year and a half because you're like oh no it needs to be a year and a half or were they like sorry we don't have any openings for a year and a half no we picked it like and like i said she was gonna be a teacher so she wanted to get married during the summer she was off but like yeah there's none like the the next summer like you had to wait to the next year which is pretty typical and how much was it for you to book that wedding venue i want to say 7 000 or so just for the venue not including like alcohol decor catering none of that you know just straight up and did you put that seven thousand dollars down then or when usually like 50 down and then 50 like a little closer to your date three six months out whatever okay all right so you book it a year and a half out at what point were you like this wedding venue and business is pretty interesting was it right then or was it a couple years lag in between no pretty much right then we toured like one venue.

4:09My father-in-law had been like in construction world a little bit. So he's looking around at the building, you know, and being like, I could do this, I could build this kind of thing, you know? Yeah, like, you know, it's one of those businesses, it's so easy, you know, you look at the calendar, you see how booked up they are, you know what they're charging. So you can do quick math on what they're making and, you know, assume it's super easy. And we were one of those people that thought that definitely not that easy, or not as easy as that, I should say. Yeah, I always say those are the words that get every entrepreneur into trouble how hard could it be yeah basically how hard i mean how hard could it be yeah it's 365 days they're booked 80 of the time we know what the rate is okay we we put a little putting green together we'll find some vendors how hard could it be easy easy and then six months in you're like oh f me this is way harder than i thought it was going to be like 14 weddings back to back every friday saturday with a one-year-old you know back at home 18 hour days yeah you might start to to reconsider what did we do you started planning this with your future father-in-law before you were even married you were like i think we could buy a venue i think we could do x y and z and remind me again what was your experience at the time so we're definitely what my wife my father-in-law like we're all like thinking about talking about it pretty much at that point it was a couple years later before we got super serious my experience at that point just graduated college so like i was like getting my I had my first job out of college and I had a couple that were crap.

5:32But eventually I kind of fell into a couple of different like finance roles. And I also did like like inside sales, like help with like online leads for like a real estate brokerage. I ended up getting like two like remote, like full time jobs pretty much. And that's kind of how I doubled it for a hot second. And that's really like how we saved up like enough cash. Like my wife was teaching, not a great huge salary. But I mean, we live in Iowa. We're living cheap. We lived like we lived in college for like the next two, three years. and then once I had like we basically had three salaries for a minute.

6:01I think it's interesting because there's a lot of entrepreneurs or a lot of people who have an idea and they're like, man, I really want to start virtual golf whatever spot or I really want to start a tree trimming business or I really want to start a wedding venue. And they've got that in their head. And lots of times it's like for a couple of years and they've thought through everything. They thought through the business plan and like how much would it cost and well, how much money could I generate and where would I actually go and buy and who could I go? So it's like they've been thinking about it for a long time, but there's always kind of a moment where it's, what's the same crap or get off the pot?

6:32It's like, all right, put up or shut up. Yeah. What was that for you? Like you'd been obviously thinking about it. You guys been talking about it. What was the moment where you were like, I got to do this? It was like mid COVID, you know, when we had a lot of time at home or time thinking. My wife was like teaching, like I said, and COVID was pretty much hell for them. And she was just like ultra stressed out. She would go in and I had those two full time jobs. She was literally going in early, staying late, you know, come home and do stuff like she's working more than I did with two full time jobs.

7:02And just like, well, what are we doing? But she liked it. But then she got stressed and I was like, do you really want to do this for the next 30 years sort of thing? So then she always loved weddings. So she's talking about wedding planning. And that's kind of like when we circled back to the wedding venue, you know, like we've been saving up some cash. I always thought like I'd get into like real estate. I thought I was, you know, smart in that area. not necessarily but you know i i wanted to do something like that i want to do something on my own too so this was like a cool thing for us to both do but it's still scary like what was the moment where you're like oh we have enough money i have some experience like i think this is like was there a moment or was it it's fine if there wasn't a moment i'm just curious what what finally got you pushed over the edge i kind of knew that like going in i was like if we're gonna do this like we just need to like actually do it and we need to be super serious about it like i don't want to talk about it i don't want to be one of those people that like you know sit on it for a couple years because then it's just it's not gonna happen life's gonna happen you know like we hadn't had kids yet like we're so it's like i just felt like it was now or never which it probably necessarily wasn't but so i definitely drove it we did like pay some like a consultant in the space like five grand and it was like if we're gonna like spend this kind of money like we better be serious so i think like spending money towards like something in in that you know to get started like forced us to really get going.

8:21I told you like we had like talked with my father-in-law like quite a bit about like the idea and stuff. And like we told him we're gonna like pay these guys like who had built the venue before like five grand to help us get started. And he thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, which is really - So wait, wait, why did he say it was dumb? We were like bickering and fighting. It's like, well, we're the ones that are gonna do it. Like we're the ones who are gonna spend the money. So like whatever. Did he say it was dumb? Cause it was like, hey, don't buy a course. What do you need to learn from somebody else?

8:48basically it was just like all you need to do is like this this and this like it's not that hard like you know go figure out how many people you want to hold call the county see how many parking spots you need you know like yeah being probably more logical but we're just like you know was it dumb hold on looking back was it dumb do you like do you regret paying people who had done it before no no because we did learn a little bit even though like we didn't like we could have did like multiple stages with them and like kept going with them they would like helped us from start to finish really they kind of just help us like with some like financial models you know getting started like base like square footage needs things like that design like super high level design things like that but it forced us to one get started forced us to spend money and get serious about it and then like we did get some like baseline knowledge from it that we used and i've used and taught others that similar so definitely don't regret it but like in theory we didn't need them like we didn't we ended up figuring out our own basically anything with real estate attached to it can be capital intensive because you're not only launching a business, which is the services side of things, but you also have real estate.

9:50So there's capex, you've got to actually take care of this thing, etc. But because of that, you need to have more cash when you get started. And you built this venue from the ground up. So you're like, you got to talk to an architect, you got to get general contractor, you got to get subs, all of those things. Did you put a dollar amount before you launched where you're like, all right, if we're going to do this, we got to have like 200 grand to get the construction loan to do all these things? Or did you just think, yeah, when we're ready, we'll just go get a loan from a bank. Did you understand?

10:17No, so like I said, I was kind of from like finance world. Like I read a lot and try to teach myself a lot about like real estate, things like that. So I understood like what was needed on that side around that time is like when I did learn about like SBA loans. So that was kind of like the mindset flip of like, maybe one day we'll do this versus like, okay, maybe like if we can build this thing for like 1.5 and I can get like an SBA, 7a loan for like 10 % down all I need is 150k cash and we were like on our way like we're like I can you know do our monthly budget and you know tell you when we're gonna like save that I had this huge spreadsheet kind of thing so that kind of gave us the confidence so 10 % cash was 150 ,000 you knew 150 was kind of the number yeah and we thought we could build it for 1.5 ended up being almost double that but that gave us the the false confidence to actually go after it and and really start spending a lot of money towards things.

11:13When you went to the SBA, did you say, this is the business plan, fund the business? Or did they give you a construction loan? Was it a combination of the two? I've never done that with the SBA with the real estate and the business attached to it. So I'm curious what that process looked like. Yeah, no. So you had, here's business plan. Like we ended up getting like the land and the contract, like earnest money down. We had already started on like some building plans and like architectural plans. Like, so we started throwing money at that, like down payments towards that, towards the builder. So like we had all that like lined up and then we like...

11:46Before you even had financing. We were like, I was going back and forth with them. Like, of course I had like a business plan, like a Performa, those kinds of things. Send them over personal info, all that stuff. But like we hadn't had it like locked and loaded. I guess I just assumed we were going to get it. I don't really know why. But, and even then like you get like a commitment letter kind of thing from them. and I thought that was like we're approved you know but yeah necessarily like what do you mean committee has to go through a committee underwriting I've never heard of those words yeah so that's like a whole nother story too because then the project got delayed because of COVID and we're buying from like this developer it was there's a whole thing and then by the time we got delayed prices went crazy and like every time we went and got like new bids from like subs and stuff, they'd go up, you know, insane amounts.

12:35So that's like, I think our first realistic budget was like 2.1 or 2 and we ended at like more like 2.7. So. Wow. When you're doing it with the SBA, you're presenting a business plan and construction plan. Does that make sense what I'm asking? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you're, you're like running two things concurrently with them. So you were not only developing the business case of like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is how much demand there is in this area of Iowa. These are other comps. This is how much they charge. I'm assuming you did all those like competitive analysis for the business, right?

13:08Yes. Okay. And then for the construction, that's why you were going out to architects, GCs, you had to buy the land, all of those things so that you could go to the bank and say, all right, and this is the plan we have for the construction and how much it will cost. Did you buy the land first and then go to the SBA or was it just under contract and then you went to the SBA? Like what did that, what did mechanics of that process yeah so we got under contract and then we did not buy it like we were able to like one big loan like everything for the land all the whole building and then all your like ff and e too it's like furniture fixtures and equipment all basically wrapped into one big one that's that's the cool part about sba 7a you can do all that real estate attached you can do like a 25 year am versus like 10 year for like normal businesses then there is like the sba 504 which is just real estate.

13:54Wow. But more 15 % down, but you wouldn't be able to tack on like your furniture, fixtures and equipment, in which we had like a couple hundred grand worth of stuff like that. So did you do the 7A or the 504A? We did 7A. Typically, an SBA loan is going to be a 10-year amortization period. And what that means is the interest plus the principal, they're going to amortize that over time. So for example, like my first business, I want to say we had a$2 million loan from the SBA and our monthly payment was about$25 ,000 a month. But that was a 10-year amortization period. If we had had it over 25 years, if there's real estate attached to it, our monthly payment would have gone 25.

14:31Probably I'd have to do the math, but I'd probably cut in half, probably$12 ,000 a month, let's call it, potentially even more. Somebody in the comments would be like, actually, if you look at it, it's way, whatever. I don't know what the number is, but it's way less. So that's the advantage of having real estate attached to it because you have that physical asset you can amortize it over a longer period of time does it change the term of the loan is the loan 25 years as well or is it still 10 no it's 25 okay so the amortization and the term of the loan are 25 years do you start making payments right away or is there like this deferral period because they know you're building and they're like all right in year two you got to start making payments yeah deferral interest like still occurs of course but you basically like that's like a line line up in your loan is like the the interest that's gonna like be building up in that time while you're doing construction a nine month build or so projected and then they gave you like an four or five months even after that so we didn't basically no payments for like 13 months or so but we finished in like seven or eight months that's awesome feels like a nice little buffer in there i mean you can even throw a working cap in there yeah the 7a you can really do anything and everything but you know comes with the price tag as well so did the money hit your bank and then you managed everything or Or was it like they gave it in?

15:43Yeah, it was like, you know, basically kind of like a true construction loan from anywhere else. Like it goes like towards the contractors and like it's basically slowly pulled down like in a draw. And there's like contingency funds in there and things too. So does the bank make the payments or like how does it work? Our builder honestly had to deal with more of that side because like he was the one like getting paid and then paying the subs. Did you have to like submit everything through the bank and then the bank and the subs handled that process? or like administratively, what were you doing with the bank in particular during that time?

16:16Basically, just like facilitating the convos between builder and loan, you know, whoever they assign, not a loan officer, but they like assign someone basically to the loan that deals specifically with like construction loans and going and checking up on progress and things like that. So yeah, because my SBA loan, like part of the reason I loved it is because like there were no covenants. I shouldn't say there were no covenants. There are covenants, but it's not like I was meeting quarterly with my banker to be like, what does your balance sheet look like? And what are your accounts receivable?

16:46What's your cash conversion? That wasn't the case. I think we submitted something once a year. Like we still had to submit things, but it wasn't anything crazy. But I'm assuming with the construction loan, there's a lot more coordination and conversation going on. where, so in order to do the construction loan, basically, I just want to recap, business plan, construction plan, both presented to the bank at the same time. And they look at it as one whole package and approve or deny. The cap on that is still$5 million. Like it's still a typical SBA loan. I believe so, yeah. And there's no refinance.

17:19It's not like, yeah, in year three, we're going to refinance and... You can. With the SBA, I'm saying. I think you can still do a refire with an SBA. Well, I know anybody can refinance. I just was wondering if there was a process. No, no, no, like balloon, like, and then like need to refinance or anything like that. You originally budget 1.5, you end up doing 2.8 in total cost. And so that's a big swing. It's probably the difference between like, I don't know, I'm just going off the top of my head,$15 ,000 a month in a debt payment up to probably$30 ,000 a month. So it's like double the debt payment.

17:55Was that scary? because I mean you kind of underwrote the deal on one thing and then obviously became a lot more expensive yeah yeah so the the whole story there too is pretty wild so we actually don't have our SBA loan anymore either yeah so like mid during the craziness prices kept going way up we were working with this builder and he actually had left his company to start his own company and became our JC and we became like really good friends with them like during that time and then And like that whole construction process of all that and stuff was pretty much hell getting going with the SBA and stuff.

18:31We ended up actually going to a local credit union. He helped us go to like we would never we wouldn't have been able to get approved. He was able to on his side and they we basically partnered on the real estate side of the business. They got us out of the SBA loan. We locked in like a 3.25 % or something on the venue side. And we just did like a lease to like purchase like on that side with him. So it got us out of this like crazy, crazy. Well, at least at least a purchase with who the bank, the builder. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract.

19:03I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like subscribe and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. we both get a ton of value but i just want to help you keep your word so would you do me a favor will you go leave a five-star review for me on apple or spotify it would really help and if you want even share this with a friend or builder oh the builder oh okay on the real estate side that helped us like actually make it work because this is going to be his like first huge project too and he you know really didn't want to fall apart and then like prices kept going up on us And like we were also like nervous to like the SBA went on like 300K and like contingency funds and blah, blah.

19:54So, yeah, whole, whole crazy side story there. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I just feel bad. Also, a lot of that only happened and like we can only make it work because we started taking bookings like well before we had even started construction. so we were supposed to have like july of 2021 i think it was we didn't end up actually getting yelled at like truly break ground and start until like april of 2022 oh my gosh dude this development that we're buying like a chunk like a couple acres in this like bigger development but the bigger development can get like its final plat approval from the county because this like piece for the waterless station was delayed because of COVID.

20:41Can I translate this for people? You were taking deposits. You were taking deposits from people who wanted to get married, telling them they were going to get married at a certain date, banking on the fact that the construction was going to start. So it was good from a cashflow standpoint because all of a sudden you had some cash coming in that you could apply to some of these costs. But you probably got really stressed really quick because you were like, F me, construction is going long. I don't think we're going to be able to host these people's weddings. Yeah, no. the most successful thing you know we've been we mostly did it because we were young and dumb like we just we didn't know like we thought it was gonna happen like we thought we were good like you know people are saying like seven month build times we're like okay it's july july now we'll give ourselves you know a year we'll say it's gonna be done in july of 22 or five month buffer you know we're like that that should be fine that's cool that's good dude no no no we'll be conservative people say it's seven months yeah we'll give it 12 yeah we'll give it you know what we're gonna be conservative that's what we thought you know and we're like we'll we'll make it so funny we'll go in there and do shit ourselves if we have to and it's just like you know we couldn't even get started for oh my gosh well i don't know oh my god nine months later yeah so like we were taking these bookings everything was going great like we're crushing we had some really cool renderings you know we'd meet with people at the coffee shops instead of doing like a tour or something you know show them all this stuff i don't know at that time what we were at but we ended up at almost 100 weddings booked before we finished construction like before we like officially officially opened um and that's even with basically december of that year december 2022 we're like all right like we're supposed to be done next july we couldn't even like we really wanted to be able to like get started and get like our footings and concrete done before winter started and we could have maybe made that July deadline.

22:29But once we missed that, we're like, all right, like we got to tell these people before. Did you refund? I forget. I forget. Did you refund? Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's 14 weddings that we had to go to and tell them like, hey, we're not gonna be done in time. Like super sorry. Like this is all. And remind me, a hundred weddings at what was the price point? Like what did they deposited? Anywhere between six to eight, maybe. I think at that time we were charging. So 50 % down. So, So, you know, three,$4 ,000 deposit. You had like$300 ,000 to$400 ,000 in deposits. Oh, my gosh. And it was at this point that you thought, oh, this is how Ponzi schemes happen.

23:07I was trying to think of that because I didn't want to be one of those. But this is definitely how Ponzi schemes happen. No, man, I've been there before. We had this perfume vending business that Chris and I launched. And it was like, these people want perfume vending machines. this is great and they're giving us deposits and we're placing orders and then the orders kept getting delayed and then people started requesting refunds and it was like oh this is how ponzi schemes start and not not in the bad sense of it but you're just like we didn't do anything nefarious to start out but you it's just the reality of business like i got to refund these people what do i do with working capital we've already spent it on some of this inventory or construction and you can see how things then it's like viral like if you yes you're like in this downward spiral and you just start reaching and it gets worse and worse and worse was there ever a moment that you were like i don't know if it's gonna work but i really tried to i'll let that show because my wife was like freaking out you know and like i tried to be like where it happened like it's fine but like inside i was dying pretty much yeah absolute hell right before christmas you know and just like it was like the worst time oh my gosh no oh my gosh yeah that would have been our first like we just had our first kid in like the october now it was like our first christmas with them and yeah not oh my gosh stressful okay so you launch year one what did you project to do in year one and what did you actually do in year one i can't remember like revenue wise what we projected but like weddings we thought if we could get to like 50 or so we would be good i think our first year we did like 67 our first full year we did like we opened in october of 2022 we did 14 before like before the end of the year that year and then 2023 we did 67 i believe wow okay so better better than you thought yeah what about bottom line from those 67 like what was bottom line did you take anything home we didn't yeah we tried not to like really pull anything from the business and weren't necessarily paying ourselves the salary at that point but that first year bottom bottom line not like if you take out like the building lease back basically like 200k maybe probably not as high as we had original like thought it's it's way easier to make a spreadsheet and be this this and this you know but it's like getting started like we were still a startup business too like there you know there's a lot of capex too with the building like even though we built brand new and like landscaping has been hell for like the last three years trying to get that going because since we started from scratch and like you know it's never as pretty as it seems but i'm sure everything was just going back into the property itself.

25:44What was year two? Okay. So year one, I'm going to say 67 weddings, $8 ,000 a pop. It's a little over a half a million dollars in top line revenue. What was year two? Yeah. So we did bar and stuff too. So I think year one revenue full year was like almost 800K, 790 maybe. 2023, 790. All right. 2024? 2024 was 850 top line. I think we actually did less weddings 2024 for a lot of any this was kind of like a down year because covid built up such a big demand and then it went down we spiked back up in 2025 so yeah 850 or so top line and then 2025 we'll do 77 weddings this year so pretty big jump from like our 67 68 range we were in before and we'll do over a million this year so are you surprised at that you're doing over a million this year or was this where you projected it would be how does it match definitely maybe a little surprised we've added like a couple like revenue streams that we weren't like necessarily predicting like from coordination being able to charge a little more on the bar like a couple little extra add-on things some kickbacks from vendors things like that yeah i thought i thought our max would be 70 ish wedding so like this year we have 77 2026 we already have 73 booked 20 for 2027.

27:03So definitely probably cranking out more weddings than I thought was possible, which is great. Were you in software sales? I can't remember what kind of sales you were in. No, I did like inside sales for like a realty brokerage and like finance work for like a startup. There's this concept in software sales called land and expand. So basically you land a client, you solve one problem that they have, and then you expand into adjacent areas. So Slack might be an example, right? You land because they just want an internal messaging solution. But then from there, you start expanding and maybe Slack can function as a CRM and maybe it functions as a customer service help, you know, after hours piece, and maybe it functions as an education tool.

27:44Like you just kind of start expanding and then you start selling into those different verticals. But you got to get your foot in the door first. And I feel that way about entrepreneurship. I think that many times you just get into entrepreneurship, the first couple of years or head down, you're trying to figure it out. Is this a real business? How does it work? Et cetera. But then you start to figure it out. You pick your head up and it's just like, all of a sudden other opportunities start coming your way that you didn't even think about. And it feels like you're in that space, that moment right now.

28:13Do you feel that way? Do you feel like that's kind of where you are? Yeah, definitely. Especially in the wedding, Benny specific, it can very much be like that. We're just the building pretty much. We do rental. We rent the building. and then we do alcohol like it's very you can definitely add on like decor rental you know have coordinators right you could you know get into catering like you could do basically you know every aspect you can partner with photographers partners with djs whatever it may be and that's like something i got like a lot on like twitter or all this other you know everyone sees all that and like it'd be so easy to do all this and i you still gotta look yeah you knew that that was an opportunity yeah you basically still gotta look at those as like they are different businesses though so like be careful that doing to like doing that out the gate would have been a mistake now that we're like settled have a good team to do like our core competency now we can actually expand in that stuff you know now we can go and you know if we get another venue you know it just becomes more you start to scale essentially like those things also well those things those things make sense to me that you're talking about maybe you know wedding planning coordination the dj the bar all that stuff what doesn't make i mean it doesn't make sense what i'm curious about is you launched this coffee brand and you bought several locations right you don't you have like five coffee shops now yeah yeah yeah that's not weddings bro that's like where did that come from that came from probably getting a little antsy on wanting to do the next thing so we built a venue that went well we started building up a team i'd actually try to like keep on my jobs for like as long as i possibly can like and my wife kind of took the the lead which was good because then we were forced to hire like good managers and built a good team there blah blah so then you know i was really just kind of looking for like what's next i wanted to do another venue but interest had gone way up you know i didn't want to necessarily build another one right next door to us and then we're talking about maybe a different state and then i was talking looking at like traveling all the time building up this big management company so and blah blah we're just like is that really what we have one kid another one on the way probably not so we kind of toned down that idea you know and then i thought i'm only probably gonna have one venue then so i was like i kind of started to x-nate that idea out in my head and then i was looking everyone's buying a business on twitter right so i was looking for businesses for sale so all these they're like four independently owned like coffee shops all in the same name now franchise or anything for sale and one was like actually like right next to our house and that one of that one was like the one we used as our office when we were building the venue.

30:47Really? Yeah. So we would always meet our couples there when we were talking about doing those virtual tours, essentially, with them. We would show them renderings and do all this stuff. And then we're like, we're kind of in the hospitality space. This kind of makes sense. Now we can maybe just have more local businesses and we won't have to be traveling. Yeah, you talk yourself into it. Have our family here kind of thing. Yeah, we kind of talk ourselves into it. So we did that. We bought them. we remodeled almost every shop we've rebranded changed the name we pretty much changed everything about it so it's like what did we buy but yeah we did buy like well what how big was it like how much revenue was it doing a million maybe a million two okay yeah how has that integrated so when did you close on that sorry let me ask that first when did you close on that close august of 2024 so okay so over a year over a year at this point how was that integration was it what you thought it would be because you went from starting a business from scratch to buying a business what i'm assuming you had to get did you go through the sba or no yeah we did for that one so we're going to be alone there it's different you know it is definitely a lot easier in a lot of ways to buy a business and you know coming in was maybe a little more challenging than we thought but now looking back like i never would have wanted like start these four from this like the from scratch or anything you know and we did have like a little bit of scale like having four shops and i could like put someone over top and managing all four versus me like you know being back behind there grinding it out like if you did like one and then try to open another that sort of thing so easier in that way i would say like we went through like every piece of the business and probably changed it you know from exploring you know every new vendor like all the softwares they were using you know all these things to make it more efficient which is good it's forced us like really really learn the business and really quick when we originally bought it there's even like employees that like saw my Twitter and like saw me talking about the venue and then you know buying this business and stuff like that and I definitely would say they probably looked down upon me negatively a little bit.

32:51You went from one location doing a million dollars a year basically to five locations combined doing a million dollars a year. Do you regret that? Are you excited about that? Because like it's it's one thing to manage a physical one physical location that's doing a million dollars but then you got five physical locations that are all doing like two hundred thousand dollars a piece how has that been yeah so we should do about two mil this year now but the five locations we originally bought four and we added on the fifth recently actually last in august so that's good we definitely like got it rocking and rolling now but yeah managing basically six physical like locations actually seven if you count my wife's baby boutique but it's definitely a challenge we did like bring we hired like my father-in-law like full-time to be like full-time maintenance like between like all all of them which is a big help it's just like different it's you know wedding is like big day high stress high ticket you know and that's why you pull that and it's just it's not busy every single day you know during the weeks busy like they're doing tours contracts that kind of stuff but it's not like been open like the coffee shops are open seven days a week, which can be stressful at times.

34:03Thankfully, I have some really good managers. I'll ask it a different way. I look at that and I'm like, okay, one location, million dollars top line, probably doing somewhere in the ballpark of$400 ,000 bottom line. Tell me, am I way off? Nope. Okay, cool. Then I go to five locations and let's say they're doing$2 million this year in top line revenue. They're probably doing about the same amount,$400 ,000 in bottom line or am I way off less but yeah you know 10 yeah yeah so like that's my point is like like why not just stay in the wedding venue business and do you know a new wedding venue all the time like the coffee shops seem like a harder business how do you feel about like do you regret doing it or now that you've done it are you like oh I want to go more all in on the coffee shop experiential business not the wedding venue experiential yeah I just think they're they're different and and And in our head is like, why not?

35:00Why can't we do both? That kind of thing versus one or the other, if that makes sense. It was more just like an opportunity that popped up like locally. It's not like, you know, we went a state away to go buy these and we like went and chased them down. It was just like shops that we were already going to. We saw come up as an opportunity and we're like, hey, we can do this. And we were definitely like, we want to do another venue, but we're like, where? And like, we would basically, you know, it's a$3 million building, 2.5, whatever, you know versus like three times as less for like the shops kind of thing it's just like sure we felt like we were not doubling down with the coffee shops where like if we did a venue we'd basically be doubling down like risking the first venue if that makes sense not that we don't want to we're looking at it oh because you'd have to collateralize the loan effectively with that venue it's like that second venue failed it basically would knock out both venues likely did you not have to collateralize this new sba loan with the venue or was that we're in team like both but we could probably make it work with one of the you know yeah as long as the venue's going well how did you buy it doing a million dollars a year and then a year later you're doing two million dollars a year yeah it was on i would we've only owned it for like a year and change or so it was on pace for like 1.2 1.3 or so and now we added a whole other shop though too so that's like the biggest jump but i think year over year like when last august and september october we're up like 30 to 40 percent in some of those months like year over year like same shop sales how did you grow did you add more we went a lot of the shops ourselves we changed the name so change all the branding you know we partnered with like a lot of like local vendors for like pastries you know our milk provider and we promoted that like a local sporting local kind of thing we did race prices so it has like a little bit to do with that but we redesigned like the whole food menu you're blowing my mind like you're blowing we had to go through my mind every single like line of the business and try to like correct and make it better the way i look at it is like you know wedding venues so going into the next wedding venue would be that much easier you know where where the problems are going to arise buying coffee shops, it might be similar, but it's different.

37:15And so there's going to be things that you don't know. There are known knowns or known unknowns and there's unknown unknowns. So there's going to be stuff that you just don't even know to think about. So it's like you're in the learning curve again. So to me, it feels riskier to do the coffee shops because they're new versus doing the wedding venue. I just don't know how you got in your brain where you're like, yeah this is the swing are you stoked you did it or are you like do you look back at all i'm like man maybe i shouldn't have done that how do you feel comes it goes you know doesn't waves i i mean i 100 i know what you're saying and like looking back you know it's more clear like in that sense i in my head in our head we didn't see another venue opportunity on the horizon anytime soon but maybe there's something in the core business that is the same you're like okay I get that it looks different, but the core differentiator of the wedding venue and the core differentiator of coffee shops is actually the same thing that I'm really good at.

38:15That could be the case. Maybe you're just focused on experience and you're like, it's got to have a high class experience. And so like, I don't know, maybe there's something there. Yeah, no, that was like a thousand percent like the idea. And kind of like we're like, these are already like, you know, existing. Like we didn't start them from the ground up. They're like full like shops wanting. They have people in place like they have all the vendors lined up, you know, yada, yada, yada. We thought we'd come in, you know, and kind of just like put our touch on it. Like we could better branding, you know, better, you know, make the insides cooler, you know, better experience.