Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - A $1.39M Wedding Venue Business — Too Good to Pass Up?

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Mills uncovers a quirky wedding venue and horse boarding business for sale on Facebook, and the team dives deep into the pros, cons, and hidden challenges of buying a property-dependent small business.🚀 Sponsors:💼 Capital Pad – The go-to marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs. Need capital or want to back a business buyer? CapitalPad handles standardized terms, governance, and distributions so you can focus on the deal. Learn more at https://www.capitalpad.com and tell them Acquisitions Anonymous sent you!📈 Acquisition Lab – Your fast-track to business ownership. Get hands-on support, world-class resources, and join a top-tier community of acquisition entrepreneurs. Schedule your free consultation at https://www.acquisitionlab.com and mention Acquisitions Anonymous!This episode breaks down a Facebook-listed wedding venue and horse boarding business in South Carolina. They explore the unique challenges of revenue optimization when your business runs on 52 Saturdays a year, how to value a business tied to real estate, and the pros and cons of seller-financed deals. Plus, they reflect on lifestyle businesses, nights-and-weekends operations, and the quirks of buying directly from owners.Key Highlights:- The surprising flexibility of for-sale-by-owner deals- How real estate value and business value intersect in wedding venues- The pros and cons of nights-and-weekends businesses- Revenue optimization strategies for seasonal event spaces- Why wedding venues might not suit the average searcherSubscribe 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]

Hello everyone and welcome back to Acquisitions Anonymous. This is the internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. Today, we have our first ever Facebook deal. So Mills went sleuthing around on Facebook and found a businesses for sale by owner group on Facebook and found a wedding venue business for sale by owner. If you're with us on YouTube, you will just love the screen share on this one. And you can see it looks like your grandma posted that her business was for sale and like no punctuation, but a whole bunch of detail, actually.

So we talk about the differences or we talk about kind of the unique characteristics of businesses that depend on their real estate. And also revenue optimization when you can only sell events 52 days a year because people usually get married on Saturdays. And not usually in the winter. So it's even less than that. So this was a fun episode. We were also joined by Rand Larson from Scale Path, which is a community of small business owners to help us review this one. So without further ado, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Acquisitions and Omblice. Hey, everyone, it's Bill.

And I want to tell you about maybe the most exciting sponsor we've had in a long time on the pod. It's called CapitalPad. And it is the thing that I wish existed when I started my journey of operating and investing in small businesses. So CapitalPad is a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs that is people who want to buy a business and need capital to list their deals and solicit. capital from other people who want to invest in acquisition deals. So if you want to back somebody buying a small business, CapitalPad is a place to do it. And if you want to buy a business and need capital, you can go on CapitalPad to be introduced to investors. So the really great thing, too, from the investor side is that CapitalPad takes care of all of the details that can get

hairy with small business acquisitions. They handle standardized terms, standardized governance, standardized distributions all up front in black and white. Basically, CapitalPad professionalizes investing in small businesses. And the returns can be really, really good. I'm so stoked that they exist. It's founded by my friend Travis, who is a phenomenal entrepreneur in his own right. So if this sounds like something that is appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital,

or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out CapitalPad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you. All right. Welcome back to Acquisitions Anonymous. We've got a fun guest today. We've got Rand Larson from ScalePath. Nice to have you, man. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Mills. Thanks for having me, guys. So are you coming to us live from a van down by the river or are you settled back into real person life now? No, no. We're settled back in. I came to Mills live from a van at his roofing company, so not quite down by a river. But I get those jokes every single time I go to and meet anywhere, any way. anyone new in a city. So frankly, I love them. I love those memes. Well, for the people that don't know what I'm talking about, can you tell them why I'm making fun of you for being a van down by the river? Yeah, this is an old SNL skit from Chris Farley. And I can't, if I tried to explain the joke, it wouldn't make any sense. And I would look like an idiot. So just look up Chris Farley, van down by the river, or just van down by the river. And you will see exactly what I'm talking about. It's hilarious. And you just did a seven month road trip. Yeah, yeah. Technically nine, I bought. the van in July and from there you started driving around. I probably spent three weeks at home at the start. But then between September and April, I drove from, you know, Cleveland, Ohio, up to Madison, Wisconsin, zigzag down the middle of the country, down to Austin, straight across

to Florida and spent the winter in Florida. And then up through South Carolina, your territory, and then finally back to Cleveland. Doing small business meetups all along the way, right? Yeah, yeah, small business meetups. I think 20, 25 of them during that road trip. We've also done another 15 or 20 before that. So yeah, man, just spreading the gospel, own a small business, buy one, hopefully don't, you know, overpay and, you know, spreading laughter and cheer through small business owners across the country. That's awesome. I love that you did that. You were just like, screw it. I'm going on the road. Bought a van and went and see everybody. Like the whole community, Rand came through your town and had an event. It was sweet. Yeah. Yeah, it was a ton of fun.

And so, but you're not down by the river anymore. You're settled in and you, just bought a business, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I bought Michael Gurdley's business scale path. So I don't know. I don't know. No one knows him. He definitely doesn't have several hundred thousand followers, not that I know. So I started our own peer group community while I worked with John Wilson. I started the peer groups for free. A buddy was, you know, going to or getting close to bankruptcy. And he was feeling incredibly lonely at the time. So I built him a peer group of other people buying businesses. Start another one for free. Ran those for free for a while, just to as the thing I was doing while I was working with John.

And then eventually took building these things seriously around October, 2023. And then just recently, Scale Path was coming up for sale. They were looking for someone to steward the business for the next generation. I thought there was a really ton of good win-wins there. We were good at peer groups. They were good at the online community side. They were really, really great at marketing.

We had a pretty good product in a ton of ways. They had a bunch of products. we did not have. We were better at peer groups, which they had, you know, one of. So there's a ton of win-wins that happened with the deal. It was a really, really good. I mean, it fit like a glove. That's awesome.

So now you see a ton of small business owners in Scale Path, which is why we wanted to have you on to talk about small businesses. So I have no idea the deal that Mills is going to show us cold today. We're on a tear lately of kind of weird, quirky, off the wall type deals. But I mentioned something, I think on last, the last episode we recorded about, have you ever, I think I was asking Chelsea, has she ever seen a deal come from Craigslist? And she was like, no, I can't say that. I have, I don't have a Craigslist deal today. I searched. I searched high and low. And the best thing I got was a $39,000, highly successful

painting contractor in Charlotte. But that was the biggest one I could find. But I did in my perusing, I did find something on Facebook. So this is some like U.S. business for sale by owner Facebook group, which I think anybody who has done a search has probably, you know, gone down plenty of these like just random, you know, rabbit holes. But this one kind of stood out to me for a few different reasons. It's in South Carolina. There's no way I'm going to read this whole description because while there is punctuation, it just reads like one giant sentence. But this is a opportunity of a lifetime, Jamie tells us, seller financing available, 30 acre farm and profitable wedding and event venue and horse boarding business in upstate

South Carolina. They are willing to sell 22 acres of the farm and a house without the venue, if interested, but it's a 3,400 square foot wedding venue and event venue and a lucrative horse boarding venture with much more potential. It's a four-bedroom, four-bath house, and it's in upstate South Carolina. There's a whole kind of description here. I'm not going to read all this, but I'm going to just pull up a picture really quick that kind of helps paint for not listeners. You're missing out. If your viewers, this is a beautiful place. It's very picturesque, like rolling hills. There are, let's see, there's some more pictures. It's like this cool metal barn. Everybody's wearing cowboy hats.

There's all these like really nice pictures, you know, of people getting married on this property. If you're into horses, this looks like very picturesque. But there's actually some detail here that they give. So they say, they describe the house and the property and all these different things, all the upgrades. This kind of reads like a real estate listing, like, you know, four tonne HVAC unit, septic tanks been maintained, like all this different stuff. But they say they're open to seller financing. but they have a balance of a current mortgage, which is Bill's favorite,

the favorite thing to key in on is, you know, pay me what the balance of my mortgage is. But they say they're asking $1.39 million for everything. They're accepting offers and willing to negotiate for a reasonable deal for both. There's $542,000 left on the balance of the mortgage. And they're saying that they would basically, would give you five to 10 years until interest rates come down to refinance, but they want a cash

out to be able to pay off the mortgage of current mortgages at 3.99% monthly mortgage payment of $3,474 a month. Property taxes are only $3,400 for the entire year. And they're saying if you're a serious inquirer, they'll send you financial info on the business. If you sign an NDA and have proof of cash down payment or financing pre-if. is a for sale by owner Facebook page. And there's this person, Jamie Lee Bowling, who posted it. Literally business for sale by owner, Facebook.com slash business for sale by owner. Yes. It's like, it's like the perfect storm. You know, a stream of consciousness post on Facebook. But it says, like, I have seasoned recommendations that will increase revenue by 40% with a 24 to 35% gross

profit, but you've got to spend 40 grand to upgrade it. Like, blah, blah, blah. So like, Okay, so this is a farm, right? Like, this is a piece of property on which they've got a lot of hustles, right? They've got a wedding venue hustle. They've got a horse boarding hustle. I mean, who knows what other sort of hustle. How many acres is it, Mel's like 30 something acres? It's 30, but they're selling 22.

No, no, that's if you just, that's if you don't buy the venue. I think it's like just if you buy the house and without the venue, it's 22 acres. But all together, it's like 30. I think it's like 30, 30 something acres. And there's no numbers behind the revenue and profitability of the wedding venue. No. Okay. So somewhere.

That would be helpful if we knew that. But I have, what's interesting, I actually looked at a couple wedding venues at one point. Because it can be, you know, if you have a big chunk of land, you can live on some of it. You can run the venue on some of it and then turns the whole thing into a business. but there's a lot of people that try, the first thing you got to know if you're ever going to buy like wedding venue or whatever. So a business like this that depends on its real estate, first thing you got to know is what is the real estate worth just on its own, right? So you need a realtor that specialize in this market to just tell you what this real estate is worth. And what I

have seen a lot of times is that what the seller does is they look at it and they go, what's my real estate worth? What if I frame this as a business? Like the value is higher, right? Like if it's a business at 3x cash flow or whatever, the value is higher, I'm going to sell it as a business. So first you got to understand what you're dealing with from a real estate perspective. And that's got to be, that's probably what I'm offering.

Just period. Unless you've got some, this is a famous venue. Like there's a line out of the door and around the corner where you can't be Kardashian get married here? Like, what are we talking about? Yeah. Like, I mean, this is defensibility on venue. Like, there are lots of pretty places in the foothills of, you know, upstate South Carolina, Western North Carolina, et cetera, where you could have a pretty wedding venue. And candidly, like, you could build one for not a ton of money if you already had the land. So I'm trying to separate out the business from the real estate here. And, you know, like to me, the wedding,

let's just talk about wedding venue business is a really fascinating business because I I know tons of venues around here that are booked a year, 18 months, two years out. And they're each kind of remarkable in their own way, but there's not any element of it where it's like, well, if you don't get married here, you can't get married, right? It's not like if the plumber doesn't come to fix my toilet, then I can't use my house correctly. Like, it is, it's fairly discretionary. You can just choose different venues, but there is this subjective element where because of supply and demand and because of like, perceived scarcity, most people only get married on Saturdays. It's a growing trend to maybe get married

on like a Friday or Sunday, but you only have 52 weekends a year to sell. And so when you look at the businesses that do really well in the venue space, they get really good at revenue optimization. These folks have already figured out horseboarding because they've got the land and they probably hurt into horses anyways. But one of the things that I don't like about this, that would be kind of contrary to like a, this is a rural venue, contrary to like a downtown or suburban venue is that it's really difficult to rent this out Monday through Friday. Nobody is coming there for like a corporate lunch or a small conference. Like they might do a little bit of that, but the bulk of this business is 52 Saturdays

a year. You're on and probably 200 people show up and they drive onto your property and then they leave, but it's only a day and it's hit or miss. Yeah, this isn't a business. You can just throw a co-working center on top of and suddenly have recurring revenue. This is, you have to get really, really good at building an entirely different business besides weddings for this to work. Or you got to get better at squeezing more juice out of the weddings.

So like that is a huge thing. Like if you're just a venue, well, you know what? People are spent a lot of money. Catering like priests, favors, DJ. Oh, you know, I mean, there's like table rentals, right? There's chair rentals. There's the, in the south, it's gotten really, really popular as a business in Charleston. All they do is go reclaim old church pews and set them up in fields for people.

Like, they're paying for the venue separately. And they're like, yeah, we'll bring you, you know, 50 old church pews for people to sit in instead of chairs. Like there's all kinds of ways you can optimize revenue here. Like you said, catering. But a lot of times, even if they don't have a full commercial kitchen on site, they may have an affiliate agreement with a couple caterers that can, you know, make the food off site and bring it in. And they say, hey, we're going to put you on our list of top three caterers and you're going to give us a kickback.

Yeah. Well, that's the lightweight way to do it is just get a kickback from the caterers. But like eventually you become a full turnkey venue. Yeah. And the fact that they have a house, I will say, you know, if it's just an outdoor venue and like a barn, then there's nowhere for the bride to get ready. There's nowhere for the wedding party to, like all those kind of things. the fact that they have the house and the barn, and, you know, it seems like most of these wedding pictures are kind of outside, you're charging separately for that. So there's ways to upcharge. I know somebody pretty well who does this in the greater Columbia area that is kind of very similar to this. It's a horse property. They have a barn. They converted the horse barn into like

a place people could get ready with a nice shower. And pretty quickly, like they were booked a year out. Now, they kind of had to do some extra upgrades to their property, not for revenue optimization, but for just lifestyle optimization, because they are 365 days a year and there's people there 50 days a year and they don't want them creeping all over their property and kind of bleeding the lines of like their, you know, little safe haven and their kind of quiet space. I'm curious, if you're a searcher looking at this business, I always think like, how much of a pain is this going to be to run because you are the venue of the most important day in someone's entire life. You have to deal with what's what's it called like the nightmare mother-in-law.

Like people have entire jokes. Yeah, Bridezilla. And I'm just curious like how much as a venue is this, you know, you're just the venue. Everything, everyone else is like a different contractor that you recommend. You take a big step back or if you get hands on how much of this is going to be you managing 15 different businesses, catering business, rental. business venue, like how much of this is just becomes a massive. You're running 15 different companies in one small location with very high stakes because the bribe will kill you if it doesn't go on perfectly. And so I used to own a business that catered to weddings, which was called text my guests. So this came out of, if you Mills maybe knows the story. But yeah, when I got married

in 2018, we got married in Charlotte, North Carolina at a wedding venue, not an outdoor venue, like a urban venue. And I wanted to schedule a bunch of text messages like, you know, hey, you know, the ceremony is starting to put away your phones or, you know, the first dance starts in five minutes. Please take your seats or, you know, join us for the after party at wherever. And so I built a tool called text my guests.com that was pre-scheduled text messages. So you could kind of guide your whole crowd through the day.

And then I also set it up so the guest could text back photos, which turned out to be the real differentiators. so the bride could get a whole bunch of photos from people. So I said this up at my wedding and just like let it rip. And all my guests loved it. And I turned it into a SaaS product. So we got to the point where like we were doing a bunch of weddings. But it would be so,

it was so weird because it was totally dead during the week. And then like the support tickets would go bananas on Friday and Saturday. Right. And they would expect like five minute turnaround because they're like, the bride is like at her wedding. And it's like my, you know, I got to figure it's out or this didn't work. And it was very stressful.

And that was one of the reasons I had my wife running the business. And so we had kids and she was like, I can't keep dealing with these ladies. You know, like they're too intense, you know, and it was like all at once like on Saturday. So that's there are businesses like this that will ruin your like restaurants or one of these like nights and weekends. Like all your nights and weekends are consumed. So I have a rule against nights and weekends businesses. And while Wednesday and your wife has a rule against. We, our family, against nights and weekends businesses.

They can be great businesses. Like, I'm sure wedding venue is great business, but like, as a searcher, and this is a venue, like, you probably got to be there or be darn close and you've got to know the caterers around town. You've got to make sure it goes off of that a hitch. If you get good at that, you'll develop a reputation for that, and it will be good for business. But if you're not good at it, your business will evaporate quickly.

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today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. The ceiling on this is low. I mean, I think best case scenario, we don't have any numbers here, but I'm thinking best case scenario, you're not doing more than a million dollars in revenue. I think you can get to two. You think you get to? I know, well, the upstate South Carolina thing throws me off. I know Nick Andrew. I know Nick and Anderson. He's in Salt Lake City and their metro is huge. He's got, he's in Spanish fork. They've got, I think, three or four locations, one near Salt Lake City and other Provo. And his business is doing well. But I do wonder what the average revenue of one of these

venues is. I wouldn't guess it's above two, but I thought it was going to be much larger than one million. A couple data points. We rented like a nice venue in a good part of Charlotte. And I think this was also in 2018. I think it was $7,000. But that came with like chairs. That was like everything that was not food. That was not banned. That was not anything. That was just like the room and the chairs and the climate control and stuff. Right. Like the table clause and like all that stuff. And that was seven grand. You know, there's a lot more you spend money on. So like. Yeah, but you only you multiply that by 50, uh, 50 weekends. If you're doing that, you're making what? 450 grand. So that's 350 grand.

Like that's sort of the best. That's your core business. That's your core business. If you only rent the property. Now, maybe, I don't know, maybe this commands more. It's a farm. It's bigger. You can ride a horse.

Take a picture on a horse if you're the bride. I don't know. But like maybe not also because my seven grand is the urban data point. This is. Yeah. I think it's lower. I think it's probably lower. But there's some extra revenue that, you know, could be extracted.

But again, the tradeoff is you're probably not doing. corporate lunches, you know, on a Thursday for like a lunch and learn for two hours or something like that. And I was going to say the extra, you know, million dollars we're missing is not coming from horseboarding. I really doubt it. But like so I like this though in terms of somebody took something. They made it virtually out of nothing, right? And they, other than the cost of the dirt and the upgrades, building the barn, renovating the house, all those things, they have really probably created the highest and best use for this property and this asset. That is the question in real estate all the time is what is the highest and best use? There's not going to be an airport here,

right? There's not going to be a, you know, 300 unit apartment complex. This is probably the highest and best use. And for the existing owners, they figured out ways to maximize the heck out of it and probably not just pay their mortgage, not just cover the cost of, you know, taking care of their own horses. Now they're generating revenue from taking care of other people's. But this is a extension of a lifestyle and kind of a lifestyle business. Yeah, absolutely. This is also great if you are, you know, you want a land bank or something or you think this land is in the path of progress in this town or you've got another business in the town or you own a catering company and you want to vertically integrate. I mean, there's a lot of reasons this can make sense. I don't know this is like

your pure searcher deal where you're just going to buy it and as a purely financial investment. You got a business. It's in and around it, I think. Yeah, it's practically a startup. Yeah, I think the buyer build equation is probably upside down on this. You would want to, you would want to build a wedding venue into something else that you already own that it was complimentary with or already owned something complimentary and buy into this wedding venue. I'd want to know what the land is worth before. I went any farther at all and how truly unique it was. The thing that I like about this and what it

highlights is, you know, one, this is Facebook for sale by owner. And this is a, like a decent size business. This is not the Craigslist $39,000 painting contractor. But look at how much info they provide. You could probably, we didn't poke around, but you could probably, you know, find this property, figure out exactly where it is. You could look it up on the tax maps. Like you could get all the data around the property. But look at how flexible they are. They're accepting offers. They have a stated asking price, but they're accepting offers. And then look at how flexible they've insinuated the structure could be, which is the one thing that I really like about for sale by owner. It's a double edge short and there's a lot of negatives that come with it. But they're basically like giving you a

layup. If you wanted this deal and this was something that was like really exciting and attractive to you, They're basically saying, we will float the existing mortgage for you for five to 10 years. We'll seller finance another tranche of this. And then you just bring some pre-agreed-upon amount of down payment. Like, where else? That doesn't happen on the open market for, you know, a million dollar EBITDA businesses. But if this didn't have a low tam, if this didn't have, you know, like a geographic. graphically constrained, you know, low ceiling on the revenue of the business and it was for sale by

owner, you could take something, tie it all together, close on it, and then really scale potentially, you know, if the circumstances were different. I like how much it highlights that flexibility. Yes, I agree. I mean, it's, I love it too when people start negotiating against themselves in the listing. Like, here's exactly what, you know, we're going to finance. Here's exactly the minimum amount of cash out we need. And then you're just- Here's our dollar for, dollar how much our mortgages a month. Yeah. Yeah. Which is probably one one rental. You know, it's probably one weekend pays their mortgage. That's a good point. $300,400. You know, and that's probably how they got started, right? Like they had this land or

they bought this land and said, geez, we got to barely do it. And it breaks even, which is sort of the problem, right? There's like no moat in wedding venue at all unless you've got a truly unique property. And that's what's hard to tell. You got a truly unique property or a truly unique reputation. Kardashian got married there or something, which is, I think, indicative of this whole industry, because you look at wedding photographers, you're kind of going, okay, I know somebody that used you, you come highly recommended, you don't have a ton of availability. There's a lot of perceived value in just what is the price point. If somebody's willing to do your wedding photography for $200, you kind of don't expect that much. But if they're going to charge $20,000,

you know, you're not getting references. You're just looking at their portfolio. and going, it looks really good. Just because it looks really good, you're banking on the fact that they're going to get every shot perfect for your wedding. But there's not really a lot of transferable goodwill. Once that, like husband, wife, couple, photographer, whatever, once they're done, and I've known tons of wedding photographers who do this. And they're like, we just got tired of working Saturdays and nights and weekends on weddings.

And we wanted to do something else. But they made a great living in the meantime. And they just kind of churn a lot. Mm-hmm. All right. I think we've beaten these boarded horses. So what do you guys think? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Rand, what do you think? It's a thumbs up for the right person, but that person is pretty rare. The for sale by owner is interesting because it seems like you can, you call it negotiating, but you can probably get some favorable terms. But for most people, I don't see this for most

people being worthy of a startup. I think you already have to have a business where you know how to greatly improve wedding venues just like this, or you already run a business that you can plug in and fill in the other days of the week where the real estate is not being used. I think it's those couple people, and they'll probably be able to get good terms because it's for sale by owner. But for most people, I'm curious if you guys disagree, but I don't think this is worth buying unless you want to get into the wedding venue business quickly.

I agree. Even still, I mean, quickly, like you can tilt up one of these metal barns. Like, I think having the right property is the key. And then you just get on Google and you can probably start turning up clients. You call the wedding planners in town and, you know, pretty soon you're there. There was this great business that had some friends who worked at that was called my big fake wedding. and instead of doing like going around and doing like the bridal shows and all that kind of stuff, they would throw a fake wedding and they would have all these vendors come.

They would have like the photographer. They would have the flower person. They would have the cake person. And they would do like a mock wedding. And it was this huge referral generation source. And they would do like pop up events all over the country and just go and solicit vendors and generate revenue that way. and then farm it all out. And the kind of core of their business was that they weren't geographically constrained.

But it's amazing the things you can do with like a little ingenuity, especially around Bill, one of the first episodes we did, I think, like three and a half, four years ago, we talked about being adjacent to a large transaction as like a real force multiplier for pricing power. Being like, if you wanted to rent chairs for a corporate event or you wanted to rent chairs for a wedding, everything with the wedding. tagline is like arbitrarily higher. And so there's something about this. It's thumbs down for me just because I don't want a nights and weekend business. It is in South Carolina. So that's intriguing. But it's thumbs down for me. But there's just some like curiosity that just pulls at my, you know, at the back of my head that goes, there's got to be something there. There's some way to extract value. And it really just gets my juices flowing. I'm curious. I'm curious what you guys would think about this. I just,

Ask Chat, ShpT, so we'll get the chat ShpT report in just a second. But I'm curious if weddings, like large, big weddings, getting a big fancy venue, bringing a bunch of people in, I sort of think it's the modern day, like, it's the Instagramable thing where that's where a lot of people are like they want a big wedding and they want a ton of pictures to show it off online. They want it to be like a real event. I'm not sure 20 years ago, whether this was very common or whether it's more common now. And I'm also curious if Gen Z is going to keep following the trend, because it seems like they're doing a lot of things differently, even than just millennials. They're like, hey, we don't have any money.

We don't want to spend it. We don't care about social media as much. We want to go to the trades. I'm not sure how much. This is really true. And I'm curious if it also means like, no, we're going to get a loped. Screw wedding venues. Screw spending 50 grand on wedding.

Like, we're going to take a vacation, get a loped. You're immediate family, my immediate family. that's it something like that i think yeah that it could it could be kind of uh in a just secular decline in terms of the demand i think in the south you're probably a little bit insulated from that it's a little bit more traditional but yeah like gen z is not drinking as much like there's a lot of kind of maybe headwinds for this you know long term in terms of demand i don't know i i think people are going to want to conspicuously consume and post about on instagram for a while look at me i mean like instagram has inflated crazy

weddings, not deflated them. You know, I think this is status signaling at its purest. I don't think AI is going to make that go away. I'm not sure if I'm making this up, but at least this is what my parents told me is like, traditionally the father of the bride pays for the wedding. And then that means that they've got that baby boomer. I just sold my business, bought a house in Maui in 1972 money. And maybe that's what's funding all these weddings.

It's not the Gen Zs that are getting married. I think absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. That was fun. Ran, thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for for having me. Your knowledge and your experience to bear. Rand, will you just drop like 10 seconds about scale path? Because people have probably business owners that listen to us. Yeah, yeah. It's join scalepath.com. We're a community of small business owners. We've got over 50 members who've all acquired their businesses, lots of local service business owners, professional trades, people in there. We build individual peer groups with around seven other members that will meet once a month for a couple hours. Then we got online community, weekly expert calls, Michael Gridley's office hours.

He's still involved. He's still a partner. So check it out. Apply it at joinscalepath.com. All right. Well, awesome. Thanks for being here, Rand. And thanks for listening to Acquisitions Anonymous.

If you like this episodes, hop on our website at ACQUanon.com. We have, we're pushing 400 episodes now, all indexed by industry. So if you're into wedding venues or construction companies or e-commerce businesses, we have covered it on the pod. A-CQU anon.com. We'll see you over there.