Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - $5mm revenue online seller of Lego Minifigures /$2mm revenue niche publication in the livestock industry - e41

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Joined this week by Alex E Bridgeman (https://www.alexbridgeman.com/ and https://twitter.com/aebridgeman), we review two small businesses currently for sale:  - a $5mm revenue online seller of Lego Minifigures  - a $2mm revenue niche publication in the livestock industry  Enjoy!  Michael, Bill and Mills-----* Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel.* Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show!* Follow us on twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations.-----Past guests on Acquanon include Nick Huber, Brent Beshore, Aaron Rubin, Mike Botkin, Ari Ozick, Mitchell Baldridge, Xavier Helgelsen, Mike Loftus, Steve Divitkos, Dzmitry Miranovich, Morgan Tate and more.-----Additional episodes you might enjoy:#62 Two Landscaping Businesses for Sale - Mike Loftus CEO of Connor's Landscaping#66 Analyzing Software Businesses for Sale with Steve Divitkos, experienced industry CEO#42 $900k Moving and Storage Company / $500k Rural Mini-Storage#61 Two Manufacturing Businesses for Sale - Brent Beshore - Founder and CEO at Permanent Equity#24 $5mm pool services and lifeguard staffing co / $2mm septic services business -  featuring baller @WilsonCompanies as a special guest!#45 $800k/yr cleaning business in Midland, TX / a $565k/yr window cleaning business in San Antonio, TX #48 Two Landscaping Businesses for Sale - Mike Botkin of Benchmark Group--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dealtalk/supportSubscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

All right, welcome back everybody to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This is Mill Snell, and I'm joined by Bill D. Alessandro and Michael Girdley, my co-host. We are going to sit down and have a chat with a fantastic guest today. Acquisitions Anonymous is a podcast about small business M&A. And we typically discuss at least two, usually we only have time for two potential acquisitions. So these are companies that are for sale or they've been for sale recently. We have some information. about them and we underwrite the deal. The origin of this came about because both Michael and Bill and I all like having these conversations and we banter and underwrite deals and we thought, hey, we should maybe hit record at some point because these are fun conversations. So welcome back. We're glad you're here. And I'm going to intro Alex Bridgman, our guest from the Think Like an owner podcast. So we've been getting schooled on the nuances of podcasting before we hit record. But Alex, really glad you're here, man. Tell us a little bit about you and think like an owner and give us your spiel. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's funny. I've interviewed two out of the three

of you in my podcast, so Mills, you're next to in a few months. But it's been a, it was a fun project for me just to start and try to meet people who are buying and owning small companies and running them well and improving them and growing them. And the podcast, it's a fun way to just meet those people in a way that because I enjoyed networking, but going one to one is hard if we're just trying to explore this new area. And so creating a podcast was a great way to just find people. And if they liked it, they would reach out. And that was fun. And I started it because I didn't find any podcasts that talked about the S&B world or the world of search funds or anyone who was buying something that was worth less than $20 million. So seeing your podcast and being

on it is exciting because it's fun to see all these other SMB stuff. style podcasts. Let's buy a business. Acquisitions Anonymous, owned and operated. There's a ton of good podcasts that are coming out, everyone with a different style and flavor. So I've really enjoyed getting to see the space flourish a little bit more. And so I'm excited to be a part of it. Man, we're so glad you're here. Well, thanks for joining us. You've talked to a lot of folks who have underwrote deals, either done them or still in the process of trying to find one. So you have to just share all your imminent knowledge with us. All right, Gurdley, You're going to do an intro for us on our sponsor, right?

Yeah. Yeah, we're honored today to be sponsored once again by Tiny Acquisitions.com. So I get the honor of doing a live read for them. And thanks to them for helping us deal with all the expenses. We get this all professionally edited and everything. So the sponsors are awesome to help us do that. And Tiny Acquisitions is sponsoring today's episode. They're messages that every day, some developer you've never heard of,

creates a business that has high earning potential, but it gets abandoned because they don't have the marketing abilities that you have. The tech is all there. All you have to do is sell it. And tiny acquisitions.com is home to thousands of online businesses that sell for under $5,000. With a one-click buy model, you have the option to buy this business and be ready to generate cash in less than 24 hours. Go to tiny acquisitions.com to acquire business and start cash flowing today. So thanks again to Tiny Acquisitions.

Yeah, thanks so much. Really appreciate your support. All right, Bill, I believe you have. our first deal. This was actually listeners submitted from two different folks. And we have two interesting ones today, but we're going to start with one that's a little bit novel. Bill, you got this one? Yep. So we are going to talk today about minifigurland.com. And we have not signed NDINS. They have made it public there for sale. We found them on biz buy sale. You should be able to see my screen. If you are watching us on YouTube, we share the screen. So minifigurland.com

specializes in selling high-quality Lego minifigure toys and collectibles. It's a fun business to own with huge growth potential. They've been around since 2013, and they're a top seller of Lego mini-figures on eBay and Amazon. There are over 11,000 different little Lego mini-figure models and characters. They have minifigure land, has the most listings in its market on Amazon. and they say they've got a huge opportunity to expand into selling more different types of mini figures. And this, if you are ever going to go to our YouTube, I would recommend it as today, because you get to see the pictures of all of these little Lego men.

These are not kind of made of Legos. These are like the little construction men or superheroes or, you know, sword fighting guys that come in Lego sets. You know, you can kind of move their arms and their legs. They're like the same guys that star in the Lego movie. if you guys have ever seen that. Okay, so minifigureland.com, they have one point six, sorry, they're asking $1.6 million. They have cash flow of $925,000 on gross revenue of $5.3 million. So pretty good margins, about 25%, 20% margins is isish, although they say their EBITDA is $5,000, and their cash flow is $925,000.

So I definitely like to understand the delta between those. Their inventory, they're carrying $300,000 of inventory of little Lego mini figures, which I would just love to see all in one place. And they've been around since 2013. They're located in Santa Ana, California. And because these are all itty-bitty Lego figures, they do this all out of 400 square feet in Santa Ana, California. They say they lease month to month. I would be willing to bet you dollars to donors, this is a storage unit. It's a 20 by 20 storage unit.

It makes 400 square feet. It's on a month-to-month lease. I'm sure it's a storage unit, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. It says currently they're one of the top three sellers on Amazon in the Lego minifigure market. They're branching out into new ideas that separate them from other sellers of Lego mini-figures. They say their growth as a Lego reseller could be five to ten times their current size. They're suggesting that you expand into other Lego branded things, not just mini-figures.

I assume that means they've got a distribution license with Lego and can buy directly, which is probably not easy to get, being that I bet Lego is one of those brands that really protects their distribution. So there could be a really interesting opportunity here to just buy more things from the Lego catalog and sell them on Amazon or eBay, et cetera. They say they're willing to stick around for 60 days and carry up to 10% of the purchase price in a seller note, and they are departing to focus on other business ventures. So if you go to their website, minifigurland.com, you'll see a great portrait shot of a bunch of their Lego minifigures.

What's interesting to note is they do not sell anything at all on minifigurland.com. It just is very prominent links to their eBay and Amazon stores. And if you go to Amazon, you'll see little baby Yoda, you'll see little Iron Man, you'll see ninjas, you'll see guy from Jurassic Park, you'll see Harley Quinn from DC Comics, you'll see Frozen, I mean, anything you could ever possibly. imagine there are, as I mentioned, the listing, 11,000 different little Lego minifigure guys. So pretty neat business, especially if you're into Legos. What do you guys think about Minifigur land? Man, this is one of the more unique e-commerce businesses I've seen. You guys know, I don't really love e-com.

Bill makes it look easy and I get scared to death of it. But I did grow up playing with Legos. But, I mean, guys, this is a lot of freaking legislation. They get those figurines. To get $6 million in revenue, I mean, I know these things aren't selling for like a dollar. But in some of the information, I mean, they almost talk about it's almost to me akin to or very similar to art collection or like sneaker collection where there's this arbitrage play where they. And I read some of the material. One of our listeners submitted some more detailed information.

And the owners of this business are constantly adjusting pricing, which is very cool, but also scares me. right? It's like, it's like that watch business we talked about in the early days. Like somebody comes in and is like, hey, you want to buy some of my Lego figures and you have to know which ones are super rare and really valuable and you can arbitrage. Like I bought this Lego Yoda for $5 and I'm about to sell it for $50. I would get hosed, right? I would be underwater because I'd be like, that thing's a piece of garbage. And there's 11,000 that you need to know or at least have some familiarity with. that's an edge that the current owners have that buyer business fit, I would not have that level

of specific insight. Yeah, this feels to me like a market like being a Beanie Baby dealer or being a Nike dealer, right? So like if you end up with a partner and Legos proven so far to be pretty good at it, if you end up with a partner like them who's going to take care of you as a retailer, like Nike takes care of it. It's high in retailers, right, doing these drops, limited runs, all that kind of stuff. going to be fine. The problem is if it later on, Lego decides to Beanie Baby you, and you guys all know what happened to Beanie Babies, right? They overproduced, they become less scarce. They killed the golden goose. Yeah, that's the big risk. And the most interesting thing about this, it all comes down to me, can you trust Lego or not

not to run you out of business or ruin your business for you by getting greedy? Yep. All right. As resident e-commerce guy, I freaking love this one. I think it's so good. I love it. So like when you think about e-com, right, what do you want for e-com? You want it to be small, light, and indestructible, right? These things weigh like an ounce apiece. You can ship these first class mail. It costs you two bucks to ship them anywhere in the United States.

They're completely indestructible. Like you could put it in a padded envelope, you know, be there in two or three days anywhere in America. They're selling them for roughly, it looks like $10 on Amazon. They've got some price points around $7.95. So Mills, to your point, these guys probably moved about half a million individual Lego figures over the last year. So there's definitely an operations and logistics side to this. You're doing a lot of transactions. So this is the one negative.

You're doing a lot of transactions, which means every transaction, if 1% of your transactions lead to a customer service issue, you know, you're doing a lot of customer service. If 1% of them lead to a chargeback, you're dealing with a lot of chargebacks or 1% of them lead to a loss package. You got a lot of lost packages. So all else being equal in e-com, you want fewer orders to do the same amount of revenue. So these guys are on the wrong side of that. They're doing half a million orders a year to make half a million dollars in revenue. Although their margins are pretty good. They think they're cash flow in a million bucks on $5 million of sales, which tells me, you know,

there must be actually a wholesale pricing gap where they're buying. it from Lego for two or three dollars and they're selling it selling it for 10. So the other thing I notice about this thing that I love, you know, when I look at a business to buy, I like to go, where do they suck? Like, what are they not doing right at all? And these guys, I think what they've done is they've probably dialed in the supply chain. They've got access to 11,000 Lego figurines. And I think they really, I don't have any confidential information on this, but this looks to be an eBay business, period. Because if you go to their Amazon listing,

they've only got like 17 Amazon listings. And their eBay page is super built out. They've got 15,000 reviews, seller reviews on eBay. So what I think this is is basically an overgrown eBay business. They do no.com sales, and they do basically no Amazon sales. So you could buy this business and just getting all the skews they have on eBay on, on Amazon would probably double this business, like overnight. And so that's not even hard.

That's just operations, right? Organizing all the photos, get anything uploaded, et cetera. And then you could, they've also got, if you go to their website, they got this little area called instructions, where they've got a little button that shows you all of the instructions for all of these little Lego figures. So you could build out a content site for Lego. Like this would rank extremely well.

You could build out all this Lego, content where you're just basically putting online all these instruction manuals and selling all the little dudes on the website, you could explode this business just by doing ecom best practices and taking the supply chain this guy's already got because he has his little eBay business and turning this into a real Omnichannel ecom brand. And you wouldn't even have to do advertising because you would actually rank like this is keyword driven. Like I'm not like scrolling through Facebook and you're like, oh, you know what I want a mini Indiana Jones Lego guy. Right. But if I got the Well, if I got a son who has like the Indiana Jones kit and he lost the guy,

it's very keyword driven, right? Lego, Indiana Jones, like it's right there. And you could probably rank for it. I think there's a ton of low hang of fruit in this business. To your point about the just huge amount of skews, like the 11,000 different tiny Lego figurines, their inventory was 300,000, which is something like eight months worth of inventory. Do you think that's simply just because they have so many different kinds of figurines or do you think there's something else going on? Yeah, that's the other downside of this business is ton of skews, ton of orders.

You know, you're going to have to have a couple in stock. I mean, that being said, $300,000 on $5.5 million in sales is not a crazy amount of inventory, right? And the other thing is great about this inventory is it never goes bad, right? I mean, it's not like it spoils or expires, you know, it's a little Lego guys. They can sit there. So, yeah, I mean, that's a bummer. Like, I think you would have to, I'd love to see what goes on in that 400 square feet. storage unit, but they've got to have, I would think,

they've got to have pretty good process to like bag and tag and barcode all these things on the way. Like, you could have these machines that bag them all like in little zip bags and print a barcode on them. And then you could pretty soon, it's just your scanning barcodes and putting things in boxes that you don't even know what's in the bag. You know, if you really systematize this. I think you could like heavily automate this business and have a lot of fun with it.

Yeah. And to that inventory point, too, there's a, there was a paper I read a while. that talked about the returns from owning Legos, and the returns were like 7 to 10% annually of the last 20 or 30 years. So I wonder if there's a, to your point of inventory not going bad, not only does it not go bad, but some of the pieces will increase in value. Maybe Mills,

that's what you're talking about earlier with them adjusting prices a lot. Perhaps they're just responding to natural appreciation in some of their inventory. Yeah, and I think that they don't even necessarily, I mean, it looks like, you know, looking on their eBay, they definitely have some kind of inroad where they're buying packaged products, right? And they're probably getting those, hopefully from Lego, it would seem. If not, then you'd wonder, like, is there a way, not even that Lego could compete with you, but is there a way that they could shut you down in some way, shape, or form? Probably not. But it just, they could make your life

very difficult. I think a lot of their, a lot of their inventory, though, is procured probably in more creative ways. You know, like, if, you, you know, you know, Han Solo, right, from like a Lego set years and years ago, right? Or whatever it is, right? There's rare, there's rare figurines. They have a way where they're going to try and find those. They're going to procure them in some creative way. My guess is that that's what's happening. And so they have their finger on the pulse of the supply and demand. And that's why they're adjusting pricing. I don't think it's all just, hey, we just call Lego and they send us these things. Because I think there is a lot of it that is old that's, you know, nostalgic or novelty and scarce, and that that drives pricing. That's a great point. Yeah, very akin to the dynamics of owning like a card shop business. So I have a friend that owns four of those in the Dallas area, and I wouldn't get into that business unless I was like him and total card nerd.

Like he just loves it. One thing that's interesting about this, yeah, baseball cards. Isn't that what you were saying, Gurdley? Yeah, baseball cards. Yeah. I'm just going to ask you about why wouldn't you get into a baseball card business? So I think it's a good business. I think it is one of those businesses where you're having to really understand the market.

As an example, we looked at a secondhand watch dealer business, like a high-end watch dealer business a few months ago, had a lot of inventory. But it's clearly like the sales process of selling that thing is getting somebody else excited about that particular watch, knowing all the details about it. Being somebody that just sits up and reads the watch forums on the weekends, like you want to be that kind of person if you're going to be in a business like this, right? or you need to have the right staff that's going to be that kind of nerd to where you're like, oh, well, like, let me tell you what happened this week because, you know,

Ichiro hit a home run, therefore, like, this is going to change. And I know that because I have on my phone an app that tells me what's happening in all the secondhand markets for cards all the time. So, like, that person is just living and breathing that stuff. And, you know, you end up only winning and only doing really well in this market if you have somebody like that on the staff. Yeah, it didn't occur to me that perhaps they're going to like Lego shows, right? where guys are tables and they're like buy out his whole inventory.

So if the supply chain for this was more like that, this would scare me a lot more. My initial assumption was that they kind of had open order with Lego. I mean, to me, that would be the asset of this business, right? If they've got a account with Lego, they're buying, they don't have to worry about where these figurines come from. They just need to. And another thing I've seen, by the way, in small businesses is they might not have the working capital to keep all 11,000 Lego figurines in stock.

So it could be that you could grow this business just by keeping more things in stock by, you know, saturating that Lego catalog. So if they have that Lego relationship, I think this is a freaking slam dunk because all you got to do is be the bridge between the Lego catalog and good e-commerce best practices. If this is more like Gertley was talking about collecting cards from or Lego guys from Lego shows, that's a whole different thing. That's a hobby business. Go ahead, Alex. This is a good one. This is an interesting one. Anything else on this one before we shift to another kind of interesting and unique one?

I may have missed it in Bill's epic e-commerce rant, by the way, that needs to be put on social media somewhere. But the thing that surprises me in terms of their D to C channel that they're not taking advantage of at all would be some sort of subscription model with folks who should be paying them $50 a month and they get a bag of these little figurines. And sometimes you get the $10,000 one and sometimes you get the $10 one. And like it just seems like there's so many more opportunities to go to market rather than just playing the arbitrage slap stuff up on Amazon eBay game that they're doing right now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's so much here. Assuming, assuming they have their relationship with Lego and they can actually get this stuff reliably, there is so much here. And if you are listening to this and want to buy it, I would love to back you. So too small, right, for elements brands, which I feel like is a helpful point, right? Like, we like some of these. deals, but we're not pursuing them. And I think the reasons why are fast. Yeah. Well, Bill wants to,

Bill wants to own his brands, right? This is, this doesn't check that box, right? Yeah, so not too small for us. I mean, this is doing nearly a million cash flow. We would definitely do this deal. The reason this is not a fit for us at elements brands is we specifically, Mills, as you said, we like to own our brands. So these guys resell Lego stuff. So that makes it not a fit for us. Also, we only do kind of consumable CPG. So this is kind of not in our cat. And so this is kind of not in our category. This would be outside of our mandate at Elements Brands, but I does not make us a bad business at all. I think it's a super interesting business pending some of the questions. You would stroke a check, though, personally, if you had the right, if you had the right

operator. Yes, exactly. Bill Delisandro slinging dollars. That was cool. All right, let's do it. We have, we have a, we have another fun deal. Michael, you're going to, you're going to go over this one. Alex brought this one. So he can, he can help illuminate it for us. That's great. Okay, cool. Yeah, so this is a buy-biz sell listing. You guys, by the way, you can tell I'm old. Look how big my cursor is. So this one's called livestock publication. It's out in the mountain region. No asking price to find, so optimism pays, I guess, for these guys. It cash flows $450,000 a year on about $2 million in gross revenue.

EBITA matches cash flow, so EBITA earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization. So that's a good sign about the non-high level of capital that a business like this would require. They have no furniture, fixtures, and equipment, no inventory, and they are infinitely old. So don't know when it was established. So the company itself is one of the nation's leading sources for livestock industry news. So livestock, like cattle, sheep. What else is livestock? Bison. Things on hooves. Horses. Subscribes. Subscribe. can choose weekly home delivery and or online access. In 2020, revenue is generated from advertising, 83%, subscriptions, 13%, online ads, 3%, 3%, and other sources 1%. The company primarily differentiates

itself on its editorial content, as well as having the largest paid circulation of any competition. The company reaches a higher qualified, better quality reader, yielding proven resorts, having relied on the company, blah, blah, blah, and they have 10 plus people on these team. that are all non-union. That's a really interesting thing to add about the non-union. Total circulation approached 10,000. Approaches 10,000. Online subscribers number over 1,000, and online viewership is 20,000 per month. They have strong client relationships. They have a loyal advertiser base and subscriber base. The top five customers in 2020, all advertisers have been with the company an average of 30 years each, and the average reader has subscribed to the

company for 13 plus years. Oh my goodness. They serve advertisers and readers nationwide, and they have a concentration in the Intermountain West and Western Plains region. So Intermountain West is like Idaho, Wyoming, stuff like that, Oregon. Cool, what else do we see here? There's a broker, blah, blah, blah. It's out of generational equity. And that's it. It's by this sell listing around that. What do we think about this particular livestock publication? So first of all, I love print publishing. I'm a huge nerd for anything that comes out in print. So that's what was interesting to me about this one. I was looking for just any kind of media businesses on Biz by Sell and see if there's anything interesting in print.

This was really interesting because they claim to be at least the leading source for livestock industry news, which is really interesting because from that position, especially since they've been around for clearly a long time. There's no established date, but if they've had customers or advertisers for 30 plus years, they've been around for a long time. from that standpoint, it's interesting because you might have this, you know, incumbent brand that's been around and been in households of livestock, you know, business owners for a long time, which is exciting. The drawback looking at it is subscriptions only being 13% of their revenue. If you break that down from 2 million in gross revenue and then by 10,000 circulation, folks are averaging paying 26 bucks a year.

So they either haven't found a good way to monetize or they're, under monetizing. My thought was if you were going to be the leading source for news on a particular industry, there has to be some business case for a business to use either better data about their industry or better news that they might be willing to pay for. And you could create a product around that, given that you're already the leading brand in their minds. That might be, you already have kind of an audience that you could build on pretty quickly, especially if your average reader has been around for 13 years or so. The concern is that they just have and figure out a way to do that or there's not a way to do that. Another concern would just

be if this is a just like industry dynamics, it's probably growing, you know, two to four percent a year, something like that in terms of just livestock as an industry. So I'd be curious what the average, you know, age of a business owner in the industry is if there's, you know, new generations coming in that are excited about the industry, who are looking for more data or more ways to improve their business. That could be good customers. Or, you know, if it's just this is a company that has just reached its ceiling and has not found any effective way. So I think there's potential of growth here, but I'd have to be really confident in the industry itself to buy it. That's interesting that you say that, Alex. So I look at it and I don't,

I think maybe we're thinking something similar, but the advertising dependency right now doesn't scare me on the business. And the lack of a subscription base doesn't, it wouldn't prevent me from like digging further into this, which is kind of what you're saying, right? You're just saying, hey, growth opportunity would be the availability of providing premium content and justifying a more subscription base of revenue. Right. Yeah. Is there a way to become the Bloomberg for the livestock industry and provide not only better editorial, but more widespread editorial that's maybe more up to date with news or just reinvesting more in that? and then creating some sort of data product would be kind of interesting.

But yeah, on the service, like advertising, subscription, that doesn't make me nervous. Just to me, it presents perhaps a growth opportunity that could be exciting. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think the interesting parallel here, and I interviewed a gentleman who founded the business just three or four years ago, is in the freight space. And they're exactly what you guys are talking about. It's called Freight Waves based out of Chattanooga. And they really have two things. They have their media arm.

and then they have their business. So they're selling people access to the data that they're having. And then the media arm writes articles about it and provides input to people in the freight space in particular. And the genius about it is basically the businesses have like a huge amount of synergy. So in the end, they see themselves as a SaaS business with negative customer acquisition costs, negative KAC, because the thing pays for itself. Super duper, interesting, super duper powerful. One of his thesis, the founder of it, was that you could do that. this again and again in multiple other big industries. And I think this is one of them.

Yeah, it's so funny you mention that. I'm going to have, I had, I already recorded an episode with Craig Fuller, the founder of Freight Waves. It's coming out in two weeks. So it's very funny that you mentioned that. But one thing that he talked about too that was interesting was they used their, like you were saying, with the synergies going back and forth between their business lines. The media side, they use their data product within their media articles, their editorial. So they reference their data product throughout all of their media. So not only as their business becomes more widespread and more people see it, but as you read through their articles, you're constantly being pointed to other products that fray waves sells. And there definitely could be that

opportunity for something like this. The interesting thing about fray waves is the companies in the freight and logistics industries are huge companies. And so their ability to pay huge amounts of money for data and other information is tremendous. And I, I just don't know what that is for the livestock industry. It could be maybe the average business in the life. Maybe the average livestock business. I don't know what it would be, but maybe it's substantially lower such that you can't have that same.

There's not that same pricing power that's embedded with this. I would just don't know about the livestock industry. So that would be my next piece of research. There's a guy as another parallel business who does this for basically this, but for the agriculture industry, so like corn and soybean growers. And supposedly it's like a $20 million a year business printing $18 million a year in cash. It's just like one guy in Iowa or something who was a former Wall Street analyst and now just writes a weekly newsletter on happenings and in the ag stuff. So yeah, I mean, this may not be as big as ag, but like it's pretty epic opportunity if done right, I think.

I have looked at a traditional print business that ended up kind of growing to a point where it was niche like this, very, very, very. specific. And they grew and they were doing five or six million in Ivedah. And they had a conference arm. They had a bunch of different things that kind of grew out of it. But it was, it was actually free, no subscription. But they, it was all advertising driven. Alex, do you know, how does this company, how is their content generated? With 10 people, it's likely that they have two to four writers on staff who write most of the editorial. Perhaps there's, there's probably a lot of just user submitted content as well. So you can just submit a letter to the editor or something like that.

Or they probably just get stories from their readers. Or if a reader has some big event in their business that they want to talk about, they might reach out and want to create a story off of it. But with 10 people, there probably are quite a few, not quite a few, but there's probably a handful of writers on staff who are writing their own content. That's the only thing that scares me with a business like this is if I buy it, right, and I have captive content creation and copywriting and editorial. And the, you know, six months after closed, right, my staff decides, hey, you know what, we really like the other guy.

We don't want to work for you or it's time for us to retire and surprise, you know, you thought I was going to be here for five years and I'm not. I can't write for this magazine. You know, it's not like I'm a subject matter expert. And so I think what you see is a lot of, a lot of these niche trade publications, they outsource a lot of their copywriting to, not necessarily like a ghostwriter, right, but somebody who can go and say, hey, we're going to go do a deep dive on some generic things that apply to multiple industries. And then we're going to rely on industry-specific folks or user-generated content or whatever it may be. Some of the things you mentioned for like, you know, the trends of the season, right? Or the, you know, new,

you know, new tools, right? New equipment, new breeding techniques. Like, whatever the things are that are interesting to breeders. I mean, those are important things.

And I would imagine, like, this magazine probably gets read. It's probably on every livestock owner's coffee table. You know what I mean? Or in their bathroom or wherever. I like that element of it. I think that's really cool.

Yeah. I mean, we talked a lot about if you bought this business, how would you kind of expand it into data and outside of the publication? I would think about it the other way. If you are a strategic acquireer, if you have any business that is at all related to livestock, especially in the Mountain West, you should buy this right away because it's

probably not going to decline. It's been around a long time. It seems very sticky. So if you could pay four times EBITDA for it and it doesn't grow at all, that's a 25% return, even if you don't use any debt at all. And then you've got basically a free option on how can I use it? this to push and promote the thing that I'm already selling. Or maybe you use it to, you've probably got a ton of relationships in the industry, and you're looking for a place to park cash that your

other livestock-centric business is throwing off, and you can start to build a portfolio in the livestock industry and having a media arm for any conglomerate is like the slam dunk crown jewel. So if I had, if I own any business in livestock, I'd be looking hard at this. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that negative cack that Gurdley was talking about where if you are already in this business, you can now effectively buy advertising that pays for itself. Instead of the, like the Freightways model of the media paying or marketing for the data product, now this business, this media business just markets for your manufacturing,

but your business that's a separate entity, but you can tie it in pretty closely and you can create stuff like, because I don't think, I'm not sure that they didn't mention anything about podcasts, but you could create podcasts or other YouTube channels on top of this too that could bring in your company name a lot more too. Alex, this kind of raises a question for me that's specific to you. Are you looking, you run a podcast and you interview a lot of folks in the SMB space. Are you looking for a business to buy for yourself? Are you looking to deploy capital and invest in folks who are buying businesses?

How do you kind of fit within the ecosystem in addition to being a content provider and educating folks about the space. Yeah, I use the podcast as my effective business so far. And then there's another business and maybe a second one that I'll put together at some point over the next year or so, which I'm excited about. So I view it more as I'll build within the Think Like an Owner and ecosystem. And then if there is a business that's interesting, like this is like really interesting, this livestock in terms of just, if I think of my core competency of like it's, I think I've gotten

decent at podcasting. There's some other media expertise that can develop over time. Getting to know Craig Fuller and Freight Waves would be a good way to work on that. But I think if that becomes more of an expertise, then acquiring these media brands over the next five or 10 years could be a really interesting path, especially if think like an owner becomes a lot more streamlined and becomes a little bit more of an effective business so far. Yeah, I like it. How can people stay in touch with you, Alex? kind of blurb that you want to give about the podcast or about where people can find you and how they can follow along. I'm sure most of our audience does, but for those for those who don't.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm on Twitter. That's probably the easiest way to follow what I'm working on at A.E. Bridgman. And then I have a email newsletter that I've, I paused for quite a while, but I have, I released a new newsletter two weeks ago and then I have another one coming out on Sunday. So I'm trying to pick up that habit a little better as it dropped off pretty heavily. But you can subscribe to that at my website, Alexbridgman.com, or just send me an email and reach out at alex.e.bredgeman at Gmail. And we can chat. Good. Awesome. And Mills, thanks again to our sponsor, tiny acquisitions.com. So they paid for, paid for editing this week. We're very grateful. Yeah. All right. Anything else? Anybody has before we sign off?

Now, Alex, you were awesome. Thanks. These were really cool to talk about. Thanks for being here. And it's fun to be on the other side because you were the first interviewer that I got to do. That was my first podcast guest ever, so I was excited to have you on today. Yeah, you killed it. That was fun. We should do it again soon. Well, and so funny Antito for you guys. I hope it's okay to share this, but I tried to recruit Alex at the end of the podcast when he interviewed me. I was like, do you want to come to see Antonio? And he smartly said no. I would be really. I don't think you've shown it yet. Yeah, San Antonio versus everybody. So now everybody has to go to YouTube to see this.

I would love to visit you in San Antonio, though, and interview you at a Chili's. And it could be fun because you would talk about why you love the business of Chili's and then just sidetrack into whatever other business stuff you want to chat about. That could be really fun. I can just explain to you how awesome it is that they microwave every dish. It's a unique model. little disorder stakes. If you're a, if you're a capitalist,

you really appreciate the chilies. All right. On that note, thanks to everybody, and we'll see you again next week.