Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - A Million-Dollar Rope Course Adventure Park in the middle of nowhere?

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Michael and Heather break down a $1.35M aerial ropes course adventure park for sale in the Colorado mountains, questioning if it's a business or just an expensive hobby gone wrong.Business Listing – https://www.bizbuysell.com/business-opportunity/don-t-miss-amazing-aerial-ropes-course-adventure-park-in-bailey-co/2366740/Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous – the #1 podcast for small business M&A. Every week, we break down businesses for sale and talk about buying, operating, and growing them.💸 This episode is sponsored by Capital Pad — the go-to marketplace for connecting acquisition entrepreneurs with investors. Whether you're buying a business or want to back someone who is, Capital Pad streamlines the entire process. Check them out at https://www.capitalpad.com🧠 Powered by Acquisition Lab — founded by Harvard MBA Walker Deibel, the Lab helps aspiring business buyers navigate search, diligence, and acquisition with expert support and community. Head to https://www.acquisitionlab.comIn this episode, Michael Girdley and Heather Endresen dive into a unique business listing: a $1.35 million aerial adventure and ropes course park located outside Bailey, Colorado. The business sits on 12 commercial acres with a yurt office, restrooms, and a 916 sq ft building. Despite claiming top-tier equipment and 13 employees, the listing frustratingly reveals no financials—no revenue, no EBITDA, and questionable real estate clarity.Key Highlights:- Asking $1.35M for an aerial adventure park on 12 acres near Bailey, Colorado- No revenue, EBITDA, or real estate clarity disclosed—raising major red flags- Highly seasonal, heavy marketing needs, plus liability insurance due to inherent risks- Likely built as a wealthy owner’s “fun hobby,” now trying to sell- Michael and Heather both give a clear thumbs down on pursuing this dealSubscribe 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]

Hey, Michael here. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Today we did a deal that was listener submitted, and that's just an invite. If you have a deal that you want to cross that you want us to talk about, send it to us. We'll do it. And this one was a fun one. Heather and I talked about it out in rural Colorado. And I'll tell you what, it was kind of surprising because, well, well, stay tuned and see how it turned out. So here's the deal. We'll set acquisitions anonymous. Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore.

And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory luck. Are you ready to take a leap into business ownership but you don't know where to start? Well, look no further than Acquisition Lab, the premier resource for entrepreneurs seeking to buy their dream business. Founded by Harvard MBA and acquisition expert Walker Dibble, the lab is your fast-tracked success in the search diligence and acquisition process. With hands-on support, world-class resources and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, Acquisition Lab gives you the tools and confidence. to navigate every step of the journey. And we're proud to call Walker and Chelsea, the Labs director, long-time friends of the podcast. They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step.

So don't wait to make your business ownership dream of reality. Visit AcquisitionLab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. Heather, are you sad or happy about the NBA finals last night? Do you care? I'm unaware. I can't even be sad or happy. It's a really interesting NBA finals because all of the big market teams have lost.

So we're left with Indianapolis versus Oklahoma City. Oh, I'm sorry. When I say it, I'm just like, I could just feel like any of the media people being like, we couldn't get, you know, you want New York, Chicago, Texas, California, Florida. L.A. Yeah, L.A., either L.A. team, like, that's what you want. and you end up with Oklahoma City and, you know. They got to get their chance, right? It turned out to be a great game.

I mean, both teams are really good. The team that won only led for 0.3 seconds of the game. Wow. That's the thing I understand about basketball is you've just got to watch it at the end. Yeah, it's terrific. Yeah, I was playing online chess for the first three quarters. And then I was like, okay, well, let's watch the game now. Speaking of adventure, I brought a deal today that was submitted by a listener.

And let me give the listener credit because I love it when listeners submit deals. It's Tyler Peterson, who's located in Colorado, and he sent us this deal all because it's actually near his house. And he says it's fun. So I pulled it up, and it looks pretty cool. It does look pretty cool. So let me read it to you, and then let's see what we think. Okay. Don't miss is this amazing aerial ropes course adventure park in Bailey, Colorado.

And the picture here, it looks like, what are these people doing, Heather? Well, it's like they're on a little bridge. They've got safety gear on, and they're on zip lines, and, you know, all that kind of fun obstacle kind of stuff. Yeah, so it's like an aerial deal where people are walking on wires and tied to harnesses and stuff like that. And they're outdoors, and here's a shot of the bathrooms. Terrific.

And it's a yurt. There's a yurt. They have a yurt, too. Oh, a yurt, yes. Sign me up. I didn't know there would be a yurt involved. Yeah. All right.

So, okay. So it's an air. Aerial Adventure Park, Ropes Scores. So they are asking $1.3 million, $1.3,5 million. There's no cash flow disclosed, no revenue disclosed, no real estate disclosed, and EBITA is not disclosed. It was established in 2018. This Rope Adventure Park is truly one of the best in the industry and located just outside of Bailey, Colorado. Do we know where Bailey, Colorado is?

I do not know where that is at all. Should we take a detour and figure out where Bailey Colorado is? Yeah, let's go to Bailey. We need to know. I would imagine suburb of Denver or is it? No, no. It's southwest of Denver, northwest of Colorado Springs. So you are way up in the mountains here.

So it looks like you go, okay, here's I-70, and then you go southwest down Federal Highway 285 past Red Rocks. And that's where it is. They're way out there. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So I think that's a key factor here. This thing is in the middle of nowhere.

Okay. This rope adventure park is truly one of the best in the industry and located just outside of Bailey, Colorado, all top of the line from the design of the equipment into the setting. It has a unique aerial and rope course property. It's built in 2018 on 12 commercial acres and is located just outside of Bailey, Colorado. It's a great investment opportunity and has an aerial park and ropes course, all equipment is included. It has top of the line design and additional recreational amenities for added value. It has 13 employees, a 916 square foot. building, the real estate is owned, and it has restrooms and an office yurt. Office yurt. I need one. I want to move into it. In the backyard, I think. Yeah. I had a friend in California who was, I worked with him in tech, and he was super smart guy, Harvard MBA. And he came in one day, he's like, yo, I think I'm going to become a yurt dealer. And I was like, what? I was like, you're a product manager for an enterprise software company. Why do you want to sell yurts? He's like, I think there's a big future in yurtz.

It's like, okay, bro. It's like plastics. Okay. Well, I've been to one of these, I've been to one of these aerial parks. It was a long time ago. It was a corporate retreat. I imagine that's what, you know, that's a lot of the revenue from a place like this. And my memory of it was I don't like to do things that are for the first time in front of a crowd.

And so everybody went on a hike. And I waited until everybody went on a hike to try to climb this big, like, telephone pole that you climbed up. and you're supposed to stand on it at the top. You had safety gear and then jump off. And I was just getting to the top when the entire hike came back. And then they were, it was nice because they were cheering me on, but it made me really nervous. And I did not want to be doing that in front of a bunch of people.

But it was, it was cool. It was a fun event. Had all this kind of, you know, activities and things for, you know, the bank that I worked for at the time to kind of do together. And it was up in the mountains like this. It was up in the Los Angeles National Forests. Yeah. kind of out of town.

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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 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's appealing to you, if you want to buy a small business and need capital, or if you want to invest in small businesses, go check out Capitalpad.com and tell them that Acquisitions Anonymous sent you.

But it's kind of, it's a genius activity for companies if you're trying to get people to kind of bond together as human beings. Because one way to do that is if you get them feeling like stressors and endorphins, they come out the other side kind of feeling stronger as a team. So this is a way of artificially creating that because you're asking people to walk across stuff. And look, I am I am the first one to tell you, I am terrified of heights, terrified of heights. My family thinks it's hilarious. Like, I won't, I won't do it. And, but it's true, like your endorphins, your heart rate, everything, your juices get flowing and you do something like this. So I love that aspect of people using these as, you know,

adventure retreats and team building. Yeah, but this one is way out there. So I guess you would draw, you know, the businesses that are in and around Denver, but this is a full day outing because this is a pretty long drive out there. Yeah, like, I think that's my fundamental question with this. And we don't know gross revenue. We don't know EBITA. We don't know what they want for the real estate. We know it's been around for seven years. So that's probably a good They didn't go out of business in their first seven years, or maybe they're about to go out of business. We don't know because we don't have any numbers.

You know, that's my first question about this. You're out of the middle of nowhere. Like, how do you get people to come from Denver out to this place? Like, what's the draw that you would do this as opposed to go into one of these that's closer into town? Because there's lots of forests that are much closer to Denver than this. And no real estate. I mean, they're not even telling us if they own the real estate.

So did they just put all of this on leased land or, you know, and what's the situation with the lease? I like where did you even come up with a million three 50 it feels like it's that um that's their cost you know this is a basis bias as Connor Gross likes to say yeah or also the I won't be embarrassed if I sell it for this price go dream price I think yeah well I guess the first you know there's kind of two issues about this there's this particular deal which I guess we'd love to look at the numbers but they didn't give us any in this listing um but then there's also So I guess the question is, do you want to be in this business?

Like this particular business, like, as you think about it from a first principles, Porter's Five Forces standpoint, like, do you want to own this business or not? I mean, I think there's a lot of marketing involved, right? You've got to be found, right? Whoever's planning these outings and maybe consumers as well, you've got to do a lot of marketing to be seen. And this is, you know, there's danger here. Why are endorphins going up?

Because it's a little bit dangerous. Chris, and so people could get hurt. So there's probably a lot of liability insurance costs. You know, it's probably not usable in the winter, very seasonal, probably just a, you know, summertime kind of activity. I don't know that I would want to be in this business. Maybe if it's complementary to some other business I'm in on the winter season in that area, perhaps, and I've already got, you know, the marketing visibility to the type of clients that I need. And this is just a complimentary business. But as a standalone business, I don't know that I'd want to be in this. Yeah. Where I've seen these more is when they're a complement to other stuff. So we have like Andretti's

kind of indoor race cart facilities here. They have a ropes course that they use their area above the cars and stuff like for this type stuff and above the video games. That's where they make sense. I've seen these also just as an amenity as part of a resort type environment where you can get people to spend more. But it just seems like a tough business. You're asking people to come out to do something that's probably a once-on-a-lifetime thing for them. They've got to drive two hours. They're not going to pay a bunch of money because you look at half these pictures. They're kids and parents.

And then if you do ever get to a point where you're going to be making real money, somebody's going to build one of these right next to you. Because there's just so much land in Bailey. You know, based on what we saw, there's a point. bunch of nothing. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Probably was a fun hobby idea. Yeah. That's just, that's what I think. I think some rich person built this and was like, you know, it'd be great. We can get people out here. We'll get the grandkids out here. We can build a ropes course on that land we own and people will just come. And I'm willing to bet, except for, actually, I'll give you one final thing before we close on this one. I'd be willing to bet that these people in these

very professional photos that they have here are the owner's, relatives. Perhaps, yeah, because they're very staged photos and, yeah, it could be. Like here, the grant, this young lady and there's like a kid, young lady, and then they look like this lady who's the mom's age. Like they look like they're genetically. Like it looks like her real daughter in real life. Look at her face.

Like he's exactly the same. And there's the owner's wife. Yep. Yep. She's hardcore. Yeah. They enjoy it. They just couldn't get enough people,

other people to come out there to enjoy it, maybe. Cool. All right, so where are you on this one? Thumbs down. Sorry. Yeah, thumbs down from the Micster. So I agree with that. And then just a mad shout out to Ryan,

or Tyler Peterson, who sent this to us. If you have deals that you run across, you want us to do on the podcast, please send them. And if you enjoy this podcast, we're experimenting with trying kind of a shorter format where we get to the point more quickly. If you like that, let us know. If you hate it and want to go back to us,

just kind of BSing for 30 minutes in lecturing each other. We can do that. We can do that. Don't tempt us. Don't tempt us with a good time. All right. Let us know what you think and we'll see you all next time. Thanks.