REI182: Escaping His 9 to 5 w/ Raleigh Williams

25:51I'm not interested in writing papers for trade journals, so I don't care what a professor has to say about what I should do with my life. And I'm not interested in hobnobbing with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. So I'm not interested in what partners at law firms have to say either. And I think tying it back to the war of art, I think as you get older, as you go from your 20s, and I think learning to pay attention less and less to other people's advice and being okay to trust your... It was the first time that I had done everything that all of the people that were older and smarter than me had told me to do.

26:28I went to the best schools. I was at the best firm. And it was the first time where I was like, okay, I've done it as well as I can do it. And I'm just really not happy. So what does Raleigh want to do? And it was the first time that I ever asked myself that question. I was 26 years old when it happened. And then the rest was just in pursuit of trying to answer that question. So let's go into that. What does Raleigh want to do? Did you have entrepreneurial dreams while you were at the law firm or even prior to that, had you had dreams of like, I'm going to start something on my own? I don't care what it is, but I'm going to start my own gig, my own deal.

27:03I think what I had mostly what I call Cinderella syndrome, where I felt like if I was a good lawyer, what I really wanted was I wanted my career Prince Charming to come and sweep me off of my feet and have me be the CEO of a big company because I went to a smart school and I was practicing at a smart place. And I wanted to make, I was just naive in terms of how the world works. And so I'd never really thought about doing anything on my own because I was good at school, which is supposed to be the thing that keeps you on a safe path. And so what I really wanted, I was always really good at sports and I was really good at school.

27:48And so I was never the guy selling rocks to my neighbor or doing a lemonade stand. I was more introverted than extroverted. So I wasn't massively sales oriented. And my grandparents were entrepreneurial. They were real estate developers in Orlando before Disney came around. And my dad always had his own law firm and he was general counsel of a public company. So I came from... It's not entrepreneur. It wasn't massively entrepreneurial, right? We weren't going to flea markets on the weekend and hawking baseball cards, right? And I always kind of felt like as long as I was good at school and that I would be kind of on a...

28:27We did a lot of manual labor when my parents had a farm. And so every weekend, we would go to the farm and clear land. I really wanted a job that I didn't have to work with my hands. That was the thing that I was optimizing for. And law was a great option for, you know, I was like, I definitely don't want to do a blue collar thing. I want to do a white collar thing. And that was all done in reaction to not liking manual labor. And then when I actually did the white collar thing too, I didn't like it either. So I think I kind of defaulted into entrepreneurship just because there were lack of better options and no one was going to pay me what I wanted to get paid.

29:04I think I also have, I think I have more disdain for authority than I thought that I did. And the prospect of, I think I was willing to kind of grit my teeth and bear it through the educational process. And then when law felt very similar to that, right? You have guys that are in their 40s, guys and gals that are in their 40s and 50s, and it's very hierarchical. And that hierarchy with no end in sight on how it ever ends, like when you ever get to the finish point of it, that was just like suffocating to me. What was your next step? You hate law. Tell me how you escaped. What were the actual steps you took to leave the law practice, doing M &A, how you told your family, your parents, the reactions, all of that?

29:53I had a couple of missteps, right? Where I tried to get a real estate license. I tried to kind of moonlight on the side to sell real estate on the side of my big law job. None of those things really came to fruition or were super helpful. The thing that ultimately happened is I read an article on, it's called Market Watch, and it was called The Unbelievably Lucrative Business of Escape Rooms. And before law school, I had helped my brother start a trampoline park business, and I had sold him my interest in the trampoline park business to go to law school. And there was a space at that trampoline park business that was like 7 ,000 square feet.

30:31And this escape room thing in 2015 was just a new thing. And I read that article in Dallas. There were three or four escape rooms that you could see their bookings for the day. So you could very easily log onto the website and get a sense for what they're making in revenue, at least, because all of their bookings were public. So if there's four spots left in the room, whatever, they made a hundred bucks already. Every day when I got into the office, I would track... I had a spreadsheet. So before I did my law work, I would pull up my spreadsheet and I would just update what the bookings were. And after I did it for a month or two, to me, it looked like they were all doing at least a million dollars a year in sales, these escape rooms.

31:13And so then I went and I did every single escape room in Dallas. And I would just kind of inventory what was in the room. Oh, this door popped open. How did they do that? YouTube, how do you make a door open when you move a book? I'd never heard of an Electromagnet door or magnets moving things or low voltage tech. I didn't know anything. And I texted my brother and I sent him the article and I said, I think this could be potentially interesting to do in that space that still exists at the trampoline park that was in Utah. And he said, yeah, it could be interesting. And the trampoline park was doing well.

31:46It was doing like a million bucks a year off of 2 million. It was doing like a million bucks a year in profit off of$2 million a year in sales. And so he was making a lot of money. And I thought, I said, why don't we partner on this. I'll run it. I'll figure out how to build it. And I'll quit my law job. I don't have any money right now to really speak of, but you know that I'm leaving a$180 ,000 a year job to take no salary and just to have equity in this thing. He said, okay. And I ultimately convinced another one of my buddies that was working at KPMG as an M &A accountant, like on the transaction side.

32:19So both of us quit our jobs to go and start this escape room thing. And so that's how it got started. And then ultimately the escape room became pretty successful. So I used some of my equity to buy back into the trampoline park business. And we grew, that ultimately became Williams Entertainment Group that my brother and I were partners on. And that grew to seven locations of trampolines, escape room, axe throwing, another kind of escape room style business that we did. And so that holding company for that entertainment business between the real estate and the operating companies. We ended up selling those businesses off and nine different transactions for 26 million bucks in 2021, 2022.

33:02Okay. I want to slow down a little bit because there was a lot there. So you left the law practice really without much savings, it sounds like, to start this new venture. I had 30 grand. I had 30 grand in savings. 30 grand. Okay. And did you also have a brother that had worked at Goldman Sachs that had left that company to do this with you? Yeah. Yeah. To do the trampoline park. He had left Goldman in 2010 to do this trampoline park. I was still in college, so I helped him build it. We had seen these trampoline park things in St. Louis. We had no idea how to do it. We bought the trampolines from China and we're like, man, how do they make the trampolines go onto the wall?

33:45I'm not sure. So, I mean, we just figured it out off of these cheap trampolines that we all had, that we had to replace after like three months of being in business. So, he quit Goldman in 2010, 2011 to do this trampoline park thing. And I helped him while I was an undergrad. And then in 2015, when I quit the law, you know, and we started this escape room thing, he was also a part of it as well. And so, your dad had a son that left a prestigious M &A law company, a son that left Goldman Sachs. What was his thought process at the time? Like what? When I told my dad that I was quitting law, so I was his only son that went to law school.

34:28He had two daughters that went and a couple of son-in-laws that he had convinced to go. So I was the son and I was doing it at the highest levels, which he thought that I was a little prestige optimizer. He would always give me grief for that. But when I quit the law and told him that I was moving back to Utah to do this entertainment thing with my brother, it was bad. We didn't talk for a year and a half, two years. He told me that he thought that I was jeopardizing my career, my ability to pay for my family. It wasn't like, hey man, yeah, you do you, you're educated, you can go do whatever you want to do.

35:10They actually had a house. They had a house in Utah. It was a big house in Utah and they actually cut power to the house. So that way my wife and I wouldn't. So we moved in with my wife's parents. We moved into their basement. We had a two-year-old. And so we moved into my in-law's basement to live for the first six months. And both of my parents were very adamant to not subsidize my poor decision-making was what they kind of phrased it as. And again, to tie it back to if I was trying to optimize for the path of least resistance, I would have felt like I was... To me, as I started to pursue the thing that I ultimately wanted to do, I was always surprised that people that I knew cared about me were so adamantly opposed to the path that I was picking for myself and would stand in opposition within reason to really try to keep me on the path that they had charted out for me.

36:11That's why I think the war of art and things like that are helpful was because you should expect resistance. You should expect the people that are in your tribe to not understand. And you shouldn't spend a lot of time trying to get their buy-in to what you want to do with your life because it's wasted breath at best. And at worst, you're igniting them to oppose you. I got to believe though that you had the support of your wife to do this. I don't know that you could have done this, I would guess, without her support. I couldn't have done it without her support. She was the one, she was the only one that was completely, I had her full throated support on the idea.

36:51And I think that she knew how miserable I was practicing law. Like for me doing the escape room thing, it wasn't like, Hey, this is my fastest path to a million I was like, if I make 60 grand a year for the rest of my life, but I don't have to wear a suit ever again, I'm in, I'll take it. You know what I mean? If I get to wear tennis shoes to work instead of these leather, whatever these are, I'm in for whatever that process was. It really wasn't because I felt like this was my chance to build my empire. It was just that I was so unhappy at where I was at that I was really willing to do basically anything.

37:29And this felt like a life raft. I completely understand. When I was at the investment bank, I wanted to burn every suit that I owned, all the shoes, all the ties. I never wanted to step back. I wanted to burn those bridges forever. So when you did that first escape room, I thought you bought the intellectual property to an escape room. Is that correct? Or did you actually buy a physical location? Yeah, that's true. Say more about that. So how does that work? we knew that we wanted to do the escape room business, but we had no idea. If you've ever been to an escape room, there's puzzles and ways to make things work.

38:08Like I said, I didn't know anything about low voltage anything. And I had come from this background of buying and selling assets in order to build your wealth. And so before we quit our jobs to do it, I actually did look around to see if there was an escape room business that was purchasable that I could just buy instead of starting it from scratch. And it was kind of tale of two cities. You either had escape rooms that were doing really, really well, but it was right on the beginning part of the wave. And so they wanted these astronomical numbers for a business that had been around for a very little amount of time, or you had businesses that were just not doing well because they had built in a podunk town where there just isn't the population support to really have an entertainment business like that thrive.

38:57And they were not purchasable because the business wasn't good. So what kind of the middle ground that I decided on was I found a business that was actually in Europe, in Eastern Europe, that was an escape room business that had started in 2012 because the escape room craze kind of started there in Asia and Europe first. And so they were one of the top rated businesses. And I found them on TripAdvisor and I hit them up and I said, I don't think I can buy your business, but I would like to buy a license to your business. I won't use your logo, your domain, any of that stuff, but I just want to buy basically your IP on how you built your rooms, how you had these puzzles work.

39:37And let me just buy the US rights to your business. And for them, they had no plans to expand. They had one location that they had had for four or five years prior to that. And so for them, it was just found money. And for us, it helped us completely expedite the process of building the thing because we knew that we were building rooms that were stress tested, that people liked, and we had the help to build it. And so that was kind of the first little IP acquisition that we did that, I mean, the rooms, like the, you know, we sold that business three years ago and the rooms that are in all of the locations are still by and large, basically those first IP acquisitions that we bought in terms of the layouts, the pricing, the kind of standard operating procedures, all that stuff we just bought instead of figuring it out ourselves.

40:28And so the space that you used was next to your brother's trampoline park? Yeah. Tell me about, were there any, I've got a buddy that I golf with who's got like a bowling alley, arcade stuff, volleyball outside. And he added escape rooms. I think he added three escape rooms and he had all kinds of issues with the city getting the thing done. I don't know for what reason, but the city inspectors really gave him a tough time. Did you run into any of those kind of issues as you were trying to do the build out of this thing? We did. The first room that we did technically the correct way, the above board way.

41:09The way that we ultimately ended up doing is you have a room that just looks like an office room and you put a little, some puzzles on the desk and you say, hey, city inspector, this is our new escape room business. And they say, that's great. Here's your seat. Here's your certificate of occupancy. And then you start construction after that, right? That's the way that we ended up doing it later on down the road. We'll see what the statute of limitations is on city permitting issues. So yeah, we did. The first room that we built, we were trying to get our CO, our certificate of occupancy. And the city said, this is not up to fire code.

41:47This is, you have all these problems. You need to have all these additional things put in. They didn't give us our CO, which we really needed. I mean, I had quit my job. And so it's really hard to have an escape room business without escape rooms with no certificate of occupancy. and in that gap period, we bought a school bus, an old school bus that was like a 1984 Bluebird bus and we tore all of the seats out because we had a welder on staff because we were building all these prison rooms. The business was called Alcatraz Escape Games and so we were trying to build prison themes and scarier themes and more adult themes like ghosts and that kind of thing.

42:25And we actually had our welder put some prison bars in the bus and we built an experience out of an old school bus because we could park that right outside of our location. And because it's a bus, I mean, a city can't, there's no certificate of occupancy that the city doesn't control you doing anything with a bus. And just to bridge that first little gap time as we were getting compliant with the city, we built that escape bus. And then we ultimately started taking that to corporate events and doing all it. But it was a super stressful time because we were running out of cash. We thought that we could get the business going with a hundred grand.

43:01It ended up costing closer to 200 grand. And for the city inspection playbook, it's best that they see it as a work in progress that looks like a finished product as opposed to the finished product. The bus idea is brilliant though, to just get people... It's just brand recognition and awareness. And I'm sure you were doing a lot of social media and outreach that way. Talk to us a little bit about the marketing of the escape room. Because you're really... I know that social media is an important part of your business plans and strategies. Talk to me a little bit about what you did for the bus.

43:40One of the benefits that we had in that first location that we didn't really realize until we moved to other locations that didn't have it. In Utah, there's one main freeway called I-15 that kind of connects all of Salt Lake and Utah County. It's kind of like the main thoroughfare. It's not like in Dallas, you can take 12, California, you take 12 different freeways to get to wherever you're trying to get to. In Utah, there's only one, at least in Salt Lake and Utah County. And we had the good fortune of having a location that was right on the freeway. and we were right next to the traffic source, like the physical traffic source, not just the online traffic source that you try to do when you're doing social media stuff.

44:20And because we were right next to the traffic source, when we put our sign and our escape bus, you know, right on the side of the road, it says Alcatraz Escape Games, book here, alcatrazescapegames.com. It made it so we never really had to learn how to do paid advertising, you know, Facebook ads, ads, any of those things. And so we were spoiled in a way that we didn't understand. And then when we tried to build our second location, we thought that it would be smart to save on what we were paying on a per square foot basis in order to be further away from the freeway. And what we found was then you had to do advertising because you have no traffic, you have no physical traffic.

44:59So then you have to crack the digital traffic game. And so we were struggling for a bit on that second location that we built until there was an axe throwing business that was shutting down because the owners were moving to a new state. And we looked at potentially buying it, but we didn't want to relocate. We thought it would be cheaper for us to just build one ourselves than buying theirs. But the deal that we ultimately came to is they had done a really good job with social media and we never really had to flex that muscle. We bought their social media pages and their email lists. We basically bought their media assets, social media and otherwise.

45:37Then we started taking their social media and pushing our location to their followers. And the avatar of someone who goes to an axe throwing business is very similar to someone who goes to an escape room, trampoline park business. That became the playbook that we used as we went to new locations. If there wasn't a physical traffic source, we have some locations that are right next to Target and traffic's never the issue there because Target drives all the traffic that you need. It's just a matter of capturing them. But some of the locations that are cheaper on a per square foot basis, you're getting that cheap rent because the location has less foot traffic.

46:14And so the way that we've learned to supplement that is we'll go out and we'll buy media assets, whether it's Facebook groups or Instagram pages. We have a location in Texas. And so we have Facebook groups from local moms that are talking about where to do their birthday party, that type of thing. And 85 % of the content isn't trampoline park related, but 15 % of it is. And we've tried to hire social media people in-house and event people in-house. And the best bang for our buck has been buying media assets that have already grown to some point and then scaling them from there. Were you guys bringing in outside investors at all?

46:55Or was it just your brother and the guy, your friend from KPMG? For the first Alcatraz, it was the three of us. We ultimately bought the KPMG partner out. And then what we were doing from a location by location standpoint is we would find an operator that really wanted to operate the business. And my brother and I would get basically 50 % of the business to build it and get it off the ground. And then the operator would do the operations and also bring the capital for the other 50%, however they wanted to do it. And these are people that we knew pretty well. And so the first couple we self-funded.

47:33And then after that, what we realized is that my brother and I weren't great operators and we're both pretty OCD. It's a pretty cash heavy business. We never liked the idea of having a general manager a couple of states away, even if they made 80 or a hundred grand a year. We wanted somebody with ownership that had skin in the game. We found that they were better operators if they felt like they were going to lose their friends and family's money if they didn't show up to work. We looked at franchising. We looked at a couple of different growth paths. But for us, we had enough people that really wanted to be in the business and take over the operational piece that we didn't want to do that it made sense for us to grow that way.

48:17And so the last couple of parks that we did, some that happened right before COVID were basically some combination of, we got, I guess, sweat equity to let them use our brand, our processes, and to build it for them. And then they run it and raise the capital for it was the structure that made the most sense for us. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

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52:03All right, back to the show. I want to hear about your thoughts on finding the right partners, like how you find them and then just what kind of qualities you were looking for. I mean, I presume you're not just taking anybody to be a partner who wants to operate an escape room. So What were you looking for and how did you find them? At this stage, we had grown to, we were really helping them build, you know, 40 to 55 ,000 square foot escape room, trampoline park, like a big, a big entertainment facility, not just a, you know, five or 6 ,000 square foot escape room business. Everyone that we had as an operator that operated outside of Utah.

52:39So we had some in, we had one in Arizona, Dallas, and then Utah were kind of the three states that we operated out of. I think the first important thing that I've kept to this day, even as some of those partnerships have gone away, is we wanted to make sure that they always had real skin in the game outside of just sweat equity. Sweat equity was always a component of it, but we wanted to make sure in every partnership that I do, I want there to be a material amount of skin in the game from the people that I'm partnering with. And material, it just has to be material to them. And so sometimes I'll have an operator that puts$10 ,000 in, which feels like their whole world will collapse if they lose it.

53:26And we've had people that put$4 million in, right? And so it just has to be skin in the game, I think is the most, I think it aligns the incentives the best. Charlie Munger says, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes. And I think you get really wonky incentives when you have people that are simply there because basically some no money down way that they've gotten themselves involved. And I tried to eliminate that as much as I can. Obviously, when I did the trampoline, when I started the escape room business, I had no capital, but I was moving my family and moving in with my in-laws and leaving$180 ,000 or your salary.

54:05So I think it was obvious that I wasn't going anywhere, that I was burning the boats in some fashion. I think that's the biggest one. And then outside of that, I have a few things and they all start with H's so that way I can remember them. First is the humility of the person. How teachable are they? Particularly when they're talking about something that... I think it's great to have people that aren't necessarily humble within their domain of expertise. right? If me and you are talking about a real estate thing versus a small business acquisition, I feel confident that I can have an opinion that I don't need to be taught a massive amount on a small business thing.

54:43But if the conversation flips to the real estate play, I need to understand that my expertise carries different weight and different areas of what we're talking about. And I think that's important. Humility, a horsepower. I like to always know just how smart people are. I also like to know what they're reading. Are they reading? If they're looking to try to optimize. So humility, horsepower, their home life is something that I didn't used to focus on, but I do now. Basically, I've been in enough partnerships where the entrepreneur or the partner is great, but the spouse creates disharmony in a lot of different ways because it's, you know, 502 and they should be home or, you know, like I like to spend some time, go out to dinner, see who's deciding who's eating what, you know, you either get and just understanding what the dynamic is as best possible.

55:37Hunger, like what they're ultimately looking to get out of it. And then hobbies is another one that I've run into a fair amount where like my personal rule is there are very time intensive, like I would say golf and hunting. Golf and hunting are like two hobbies that are like, if you're a scratch golfer, then you shouldn't be the operator of my software business because what's required to run a successful software business doesn't comport with keeping your scratch game golf up or getting your hunting tag for elk hunting this year where you leave for two months because you got the tag or whatever that is.

56:14I found that those five areas plus skin in the game, I think is as close as I've gotten to a strong solution. And whatever, I still make mistakes and there are still things that come up. Tragedies happen and everything gets shifted. They could check all the boxes, have skin in the game. And then a child gets sick or a spouse gets massively sick and just priorities get reshuffled overnight. But usually if someone's humble and they're fair to deal with, then usually we've been able to come to resolutions even to make sure that everyone gets treated fairly. Those are great. I've not heard those before.

56:54The 5 H's, I really, I like those a lot. I wanted to hear, once you started scaling it, did you and your brother have a similar vision for where you wanted to take the company? Because I think that can be a tricky thing, having partners that aren't on the same page. That's why we ended up buying out my partner that was from KPMG is he was more of a lifestyle guy and he was an avid golfer. My brother and I were both pretty adamant that we wanted to do a big thing and that we felt like this was the window to do it in. And so from a vision perspective, both of us felt like the entertainment business was really like a covered real estate play.

57:37We thought prior to COVID, if you looked at the pitch deck for the last couple of deals that we did, it was all, Amazon is hollowing out the retail sector of real estate. You have all of these big box places, 55 ,000, 70 ,000 anchor tenants that are going to go under because Amazon is putting them out of business. You have Toys R Us, Gordman's, I mean, pick whatever the sector is. We want to go in and take at least a majority of a strip center on a concept that will cashflow and then use that business that we put into that real estate to ultimately buy the strip center or the center through either an SBA loan, if we own over 51%, if we're taking 50 % of the gross leasable area, or basically become the anchor tenants in these real estate centers that are getting hollowed out from Amazon and use that as the foot into the door to buy these pieces of real estate that we wouldn't otherwise be able to purchase.

58:38We would have no unique advantage. We felt like the unique advantage is we could become our own anchor, run those businesses that cashflow pretty well, and take over America was kind of the idea. As we got into building out three or four of them, we realized that building these centers out is pretty difficult and time-consuming and it's all custom. And it's not building a storage facility ground up. You're taking these old spaces that were built in the 80s and everything has... So the complexities of actually building them became harder. And then a couple months after COVID hit, and we felt like there was a risk in the business that we had never thought about.

59:20The story that we would tell investors, that we would tell ourselves was in 07, 08, Disney raised their prices. No matter what happens in the markets, parents will still take their kids to go to a birthday party. People will still go to local centers. Maybe they won't go to the trek of Disney and spend 10 grand, but they'll still be spending a couple of hundred bucks a month on entertainment. The movie theaters still do well, all that stuff. And COVID just was the perfect reason why that's not true. How did that affect you? Had you already started to exit at that point when COVID hit? Or you said 2021 was your exit.

59:57So how did that affect the sale of... And I know that you sold the company off in pieces, correct? Yeah. When we bought our first partner out, he was helping me on the operational piece. And in the summer of 2019, I started marketing the escape room business to sell. Just myself. I got the business ready to sell. And I started going to some of the big operators of trampoline parks was where private equity was. That's where the big money was, was in that segment. And so I started going to trampoline park businesses and I would say, hey, listen, we put an escape room right next to our trampoline park.

1:00:35It's synergistic with your customers. You should buy us, buy our concept and start putting it in. I had started the marketing process of the escape room business. And so we sold two locations of the escape room business to some guys that owned and operated haunted houses. It was supposed to close on April 2nd. COVID hit March 15th. And so we were two weeks off from COVID, but we were able to ultimately close it like in June. And we took a couple hundred thousand dollar haircut to get the deal closed. And so I had kind of started the, as we were building these centers out, I had moved to Texas to build a couple of locations in Texas.

1:01:12And my brother and I basically were in alignment of like, hey, let's have these two last builds be our last. Let's not do this again. Let's operate these however long we need to operate them for. But let's start the process of getting out, however that looks, whether that's multiple transactions, a single transaction. I was kind of ready. I felt like it was the best path for me to leave law. and I was ready to move on to my next thing, right? And my brother had been doing it for longer than I had. He was coming up on his 40th birthday. He's a couple of years older than me. And I think for him, the prospect of running kids' birthday parties as a 50-year-old seemed anathema to him.

1:01:55I can appreciate that. I wanted to understand, did you guys own the real estate in all cases or did you own some? Hmm. We own some and lease some. We own some, lease some, and then had options to purchase some. And the first location that we built, we owned that real estate and we did it through an SBA loan. And going through that process, we were trying to optimize as much as we could to find locations that we could get an option to purchase the real estate on, like we had done in our first location. So we had started building some... We built a bar in downtown Salt Lake because we had an option to purchase the real estate.

1:02:32So that was the long term play. And it probably could have played out if we had a third partner that really loved operating those businesses. Because they're operationally intense businesses. You have to deal with customer service and you got to make sure it's open every single day. And it takes a fair amount of relatively low wage workers to run those things. And so you get a certain type of person that's looking for those type of jobs. And they come with their own set of problems that you have to deal with. Yeah. So the exit was 26 million that you split then with your brother? Is that how, am I getting the numbers right?

1:03:16Yeah, various. I mean, in some locations, we had some capital partners, but it was all location by location. And the real estate, we had sold the location and we had kept the real estate. So that was to a real estate buyer. And so 26 million divided. My brother and I were always, in every park, we were always the majority owner of the park. And then sometimes we had capital partners that were involved, but he and I split the lion's share of it. You made more than you would have made as, had you continued to practice law, right? Yeah. I try to tell that to my dad, any chance, every Thanksgiving.

1:03:53And that's why I get invited to those Thanksgiving less and less now. I like your advice actually on, on handling the, the holidays on, you know, take a trip somewhere and you don't have to deal with in-laws. You don't have to deal with all the drama of that. I think it's actually really good advice. I got more hate on that than I was expecting. People were like, you should, you know, resolve your issues and whatever it teaches on. You can't be sending your thoughts out there without expecting some pushback. But no, yeah, it's been much better than practicing law for me. And I think I have a lot of good buddies that are still practicing law.

1:04:33And I think most of them are kind of now getting to, I've been out of law school for eight years. And so a lot of the people that graduated with me, they're kind of coming up on partner. And a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them have reached out as they've now reached the thing, they've reached the end of the marathon that they set for themselves eight or nine years ago to become partner at a big law firm. And it feels, there's no sense of relief. It's like the winner of the pie eating contest is more pie. It's a whole new process, but their opportunity cost is higher now. They basically understand that they're probably never getting out of that game and their best chance is to do like what you talk about and become an investor.

1:05:17They're never going to be an entrepreneur that's running something, the CEO of something. They're going to be a passive investor that hopefully makes good bets along the way and gets some passive income. Yeah. It's really tough to do once your lifestyle creeps up and you've got the house and the cars, it's really tough to make a move to downscale your life, especially if you're married and kids, that's a tough transition to do. I've got a buddy right now that's trying to do it in his 50s and it's a, it's a hard go, I think. Wow. Yeah. I mean, so few, I mean, in your fifties, I mean, I guess if you have kids out, I guess then you kind of get one last window because you have kids leaving school and kind of going off and you can start doing your own thing again.

1:05:59Right. But yeah, it's a tough racket. We've hit about an, over an hour here, actually about an hour and a half with all the technical difficulties. I want to get into all these questions, but maybe we do like a round two to like get into like all the other ventures and DealMaven. Is that cool with you? Yeah, man. That's no problem. All right. Cool. Yeah. Because there's a ton of stuff here. I mean, really good stuff. And we just kind of covered the escape room. That's just kind of chapter one. Yeah. We're just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So you got time for a quick fire round?

1:06:34Sure. Okay. Let's do it. Aside from practicing law, what was your worst job? My worst job, when I was 14 years old, I had a buddy that rolled my parents' car. And so in order to pay my parents back, I had to shovel horse stalls, 80 horse stalls every day for two years. And that's cleaning, picking horse stalls and cleaning up horse manure every day after sports practice was a pretty tough, nothing's been as bad as that. Yeah, that's pretty rough. This is a question I think you'd like to ask your potential partners. What are you currently reading? Most of my reading has been around exit stuff, but I actually have restarted The Almanac by Naval Ravikant.

1:07:23And what I read more now than business stuff outside of doing research for writing this book is, I would say mindfulness, kind of like The Power of Now is one that I'm rereading currently by Eckhart Tolle of just like being present and, you know, not torturing yourself by living in the future of the past. Yeah, that's a good one. Any others that you like along those lines? The Untethered Soul has been a really good one. My daughter is eight now and we have a rule that she has to read eight pages a day before she can use her iPad or do any of that stuff. And so we just finished The Alchemist together, which is less about, I mean, And it's a little bit divergent from power of now and that kind of stuff, but it's kind of along the lines of personal journey, that type of stuff.

1:08:10Very cool. How about entrepreneurial hero? So my entrepreneurial hero is probably Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett's kind of investing partner. He was a lawyer, which I like. I think the thing that I like about both of those guys is I just think that they have always been wise and have always counseled for kind of a long-term view. And I think that they've left a lot of money on the table that their counterparts have taken just because I think that they've always stayed very true to their principles. And I think they sleep well at night. And I think they've always kind of done that. Yeah.

1:08:57I don't know if you knew, but our whole podcast, the Investors Podcast Network is based on Buffett and Charlie Munger. The original podcast was just Stig Brodersen and Preston Pysh just talking about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. Oh, no way. It's called We Study Billionaires. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's totally up our alley and poor Charlie's almanac sits on my coffee table pretty much all the time. Yeah. I have it. I have, it's, it's a harder read than it should be, but then they need to get an audio version of that at some point, but it's a great one. It's a good one though. Definitely a good one.

1:09:30So Raleigh, this has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed you sharing here. And do you have any kind of parting thoughts of somebody that's maybe at a job they hate that's thinking about taking a jump into whether it's real estate or an entrepreneurial venture, any kind of parting words of wisdom? I think if you're at a job that you hate, you have to understand that the next step of the journey is different than what has gotten you to the point where you're at in the sense that failure is part of the process in a way that it never has, you know, you can go and be great at school and school kind of dissuades you from taking a risk or failing at something.

1:10:11And I think the next step of your journey will be one that is less well-trodden. You'll do it mostly by yourself and it will be much more difficult than you expect it to be. But on the backside of it, you'll be glad that you did it because if you knew everything that you had to go through, you probably would just stay at your job. So for our listeners that want to reach out to you or learn more about you, what's the best way for them to do that? I think you've got a newsletter too. You've got a podcast. Tell us about some of those. Yeah. So we have a newsletter called dealmaven.io where we break down businesses that are for sale, kind of talk about private equity stuff.

1:10:54We do research reports on kind of trending topics. And so dealmaven.io is a newsletter and also a community of kind of entrepreneurs and people looking to get their business ready for sale and people that are looking to get into the acquisition game. Twitter is probably where I'm, where I personally am the most active. I think my handle is TheRaleighWill. And so I'm always on there. If you find me on LinkedIn or something else, you'll probably get an assistant or something that's responding. But on Twitter, I'm usually the one writing it and responding. And then did you have a podcast? Did you mention a podcast that you have?

1:11:30Yeah. The podcast is called The Deal Maven Podcast, where we break down business news, small business acquisition stuff, private equity stuff. Cool. I'll put links to all this in the show notes. And this has been really fun. I really appreciate your time and best of luck in all your ventures. I'm excited to maybe do round two and hear more of what you're up to. Yeah, let me know and we'll make it happen. Appreciate you having me. Thanks for spending the time. Yeah, thank you, Raleigh. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon.

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