Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Is Buying a Celebrity Bourbon Business for $3M Worth It? - Acquisitions Anonymous 314

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Have you ever thought about joining the Celebrity Spirits Club?This could be your chance. In this episode, we explore the opportunity of buying Tyler Boone's bourbon brand for $3 million. We talk about the risks and rewards of investing in celebrity spirits. Tune in to understand what it takes to blend fame with business. Thanks to this episode's sponsor:CloudBookkeeping offers adaptable solutions to businesses that want to focus on growth with a “client service first” approach. They offer a full suite of accounting services, including sophisticated reporting, QuickBooks software solutions, and full-service payroll options.Buying a business? Be careful where you get your money.In every other major purchase — cars, homes, real estate — you shop around for the best rates.So when you’re financing a deal, don’t just go with what the broker tells you (because their agenda is very different from yours).Viso Business Capital works with over 30 different lenders, so you get the best lender for your purchase.Even better? It costs you nothing.Join a free info session / Q&A, and get smarter about SBA lending.Subscribe 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, let me give you the other side of this. I think there's an asymmetric bet to be made here. Worth considering. Let's say you buy this business and you... The whole celebrity alcohol thing is interesting. I wonder if we're kind of late in the game. Hey, Michael here. Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous.

The Internet's number one podcast about buying and selling small businesses. Today, Mills and I had a delightful time looking at a celebrity-driven bourbon brand out of Tennessee. So we ended up talking for almost 45 minutes about this. So, you know, if you're interested in me and Mills really jellant about a business, digging into why and for whom this could be a good deal and for whom it's definitely not a good deal, stick around. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy making it.

Here's the episode. All right, taking a quick pause here, I have something to tell you. This is Michael. I hate bookkeeping. I hate bookkeeping. I hate doing HR. I hate doing all that kind of stuff. But for bookkeeping, I have found a solution.

It is my friend Charlie's business called cloudbookkeeping.com. So that's cloudbookkeeping.com. They are your perfect partner if you want to get bookkeeping out of your hair and focus on making your company, your customers happier and more successful. So please give them a call. Call Charlie, cloudbookkeeping.com. Tell them we sent you. They're a great way.

If you're a business buyer, if you're a business owner, you're tired of hassling with getting your bookkeeping done. He's got a whole fleet of people that are well. trained and work for him. He's located here in St. Antonio, so I can tell you because of that, he's awesome. And they're a great partner for you to potentially call to help with all your bookkeeping needs so you can do the important stuff in your business rather than worry about getting your books right. So give Charlie a call, cloudbookkeeping.com, and now back to the episode. Mills, you can tell it's a summer episode because only you and I showed.

I thought you were going to say because I was wiping the sweat off my brow before we get record. Oh, man, it is so freaking hot. It is so freaking hot in Texas. And I know it's that way in South Carolina. Yeah, yeah. Super cool. Well, you brought a deal that I think is very interesting. Speaking of temperature, things are heating up and speaking of South Carolina. We had, this one came up on Twitter. Yeah. And I don't even know that we got tagged on it, but my, my eyes went towards it because it's bourbon and in South Carolina. Well, you brought it. I will read it because I'm interested in what you think about this. It's new to me.

So it's off of Biz Buy Sell. So it is a high proof, affordable cask strength bourbon brand for sale located in Charleston, South Carolina in Charleston County. The picture of the listing has, it looks like bourbon whiskey. Bourbon is that type of whiskey? Yes. Okay. Great. Look at this level of expertise I'm dropping here.

It does not have an asking price. Cash flow is $300,000 a year. Gross revenue is a million dollars a year, and it was established in 2018. It does not include any furniture, fixtures, and equipment, or inventory. Business description. It is a high-proof, affordable cast-strength bourbon brand for sale. Our client sources an excellent quality bourbon that has a higher yield than a traditional six-to-eight-year-age bourbon.

To that higher yield, because of less evaporation, they are able to keep the MSRP very competitive and are growing rapidly. They partner with a small craft distillery as their co-packer in order to keep production costs down. The founder is a rising Tennessee-based singer-songwriter with thousands of followers. He uses and will continue to use his social media and concerts to publicize the bourbon and allow fans to become partial minority owners of the brand, thus far garnering approximately $200,000 as of the beginning of 2022. Since the launch of the bourbon brand in 2018, it has earned some of the largest and most prestigious awards,

which can be awarded in the spirit industry. And it lists here a whole bunch of whatever, double gold, your mama's New York International. Like, I don't know what to do this crap is. Silver, Denver, I don't even know what that means. Okay. Our client has created a supportive community of real fans who love both the Founders Music and the Bourbon. Our client has taken the brand as far as 26 states. They will soon expand into Canada and exporting to South Africa and Vietnam is on the horizon.

The founder is part. That's supposed to be impressive. Cool. Yeah, I'm impressed. The founder and his partner are willing to stay on the team to bring the bourbon brand to a much higher national level with a well-capitalized strategic buyer or owner-operator who is passionate in the bourbon industry. An MDA is required to secure the SIM and it is crafted by your broker,

pro-nova partners listed by Wayne McFarland, who I love his hairstyle, has no hair as well. The reason they are selling is for other projects. financing, if the price and deal structure is right, they're willing to do it, and they will provide a no-charge supported training program. They have three employees located in Charleston, South Carolina. So that's what we got. We have a $300,000 a year, $1 million in revenue, affordable, cash-drinked bourbon brand for sale. Mills, tell me why I should buy this. I don't know that I'm your guy to talk you into this, but I did. I think, I looked it up a little bit and there's no asking price on biz by sell, but on Wayne's website, on Pro Nova Partners, there is an asking price.

And they're asking $3 million, so three times revenue or 10 times adjusted net. And that's the only real difference I see on their website, you know, versus the biz by sell listing. man, this has so many things going on. So it is not only early stage alcohol, which is incredibly volatile, it is also affiliated with a celebrity or maybe semi-celebrity, up-and-coming country music star. And then they are also crowdsourcing equity or have been crowdsourcing equity. It says since December of 2022, it makes me wonder if this listing is a little old. But man, that's all that. Just any one of those things would be a lot to digest.

When you pack all three together, it seems potentially toxic. It's my first reaction. Yeah, well, let's talk about the very first thing is this appears to be associated with a minor league country music singer based out of Tennessee. You can Google. I just Googled country music, comment. Charleston, South Carolina, comma, bourbon. And I found the identical list of kind of accolades and award, top six best bourbons in the world by Ford Magazine, platinum, Los Angeles, double gold,

verbatim, the exact same list. Yeah. And we haven't signed in India on this. This is Boones Bourbon. Drink Boones Bourbon.com. homegrown Boone Boone Boone inspired by American singer-songwriter Tyler Boone. All right.

I'm entering my, I'm in the website. I'm entering my birthday. That's not my real birthday. It is gated correctly. So, okay, so it looks like their entire go-to-market is Mr. Boone, the singer. Yeah, I think so. And he's managed to do some right stuff here. It looks, it looks like listing here,

they have a bunch of distributors across the U.S. carrying their stuff. Yes, which you have to. If you're making alcohol, you have to use distribution. You can't. It's very hard to sell direct to consumer. It looks like they also have beer on their website. They say Boone's beer returns 2024. Mr. Boone is a good looking guy.

Look at that haircut he's got going on. I'm impressed. Yeah, so he's bringing beer back? I mean, it's a good looking bourbon bottle. Cast strength, so cast strength just means they don't dilute it. Got it. It gets distilled directly out of the barrel. And I'm out of my depth very quickly on the subject.

But if you want to make bourbon, it has to, the ratio of the mash bill, some of it is like wheat, some of it is rye. the ratio has to be within certain parameters, and it has to be aged in American white oak casks or barrels. But I think there's also a rule where it has to be aged, and I may be misremembering this detail, but I think it has to be aged at some point in Kentucky in order to be bourbon. Everything else would just be American whiskey or Canadian whiskey or Irish whiskey. There's different, all kinds of different sorts.

But I'm just, I'm wondering what? is going on with like why did why did tyler boone do this in the first place and then why is he wanting to offload it yeah well i mean i think every singer-songwriter uh is trying to figure out how to monetize their eyeballs um which is pretty standard right if you're going to sell merch at the uh at the at the at your concerts you might as well sell your own You might as well sell your own booze. Considering they're taking home 30% cash flow margins on the sales, like that's pretty darn good.

And, yeah, so I think that's what Tyler is doing here. He has 3,800 followers as a musician here on Twitter. He may not be a big Twitter guy. When was the last time he posted? 19 hours ago. So somebody's running his accounts. He does not appear to be running it to him. to on his own but yeah i think it's as simple as like you're the rock and you're trying to make money

and you have a tequila brand it's the same kind of deal except whiskey for mr boone and you know you got imagine he sees it as a way to fund his art and fund his lifestyle if he's drinking some boone's whiskey on the on the stage and encouraging his fans to imbibe as well i mean i think it's as simple as that Well, what's interesting about the distilling business versus, like, let's say he was making, you know, hats or T-shirts, right? The typical kind of music merch that you sell at a concert, you know, you could white label those things pretty easily or you could even contract manufacture them and kind of control more of the supply chain. And it's low CAPX. And it's easy to contract manufacture with alcohol, particularly with. with liquor, it is so incredibly highly regulated and the startup cost are so intense, I would bet

a million dollars that this is, he's not making this stuff, right? He went to a distiller who already has operations and says, hey, I need, you know, X amount of barrels, you know, per year. And probably because this is already aged, he went to somebody who already had a bunch of stuff that was aging. That's the kind of weird thing and the interesting thing about the liquor business, unless it's moonshine, which totally took off because you don't have to age it and you can just turn around and, you know, churn it out. Somebody put this stuff in a cask, you know, six to eight years ago without his name on it, per se. And they just were making it kind of generically. Then he goes in and says, hey, let's make up a mixture that's kind of proprietary to me. And I'll put my label on it.

And it's very, very white labeled. and he doesn't probably own any of the supply chain, any of the manufacturing arm. It's just, you know, put my sticker on it and let me create some distribution. Yeah. Well, and so I think we're going to, I think hopefully we'll come back to his social media being the only distribution point for this business. So there's some stuff we're talking about there. But like, I love it. And I think it's genius to go find a distiller like this and just make him your producer, right?

And you're just going to be in the brand business and the, marketing business for this stuff. And I've looked at other brands that have started that way. And then they were like, you know what we want to do. We want to go spend five million dollars and we're going to go set up our own brewery and distillery and all this kind of stuff. I'm like, why are you taking this business, which is currently low cap-ex because you're letting somebody else provide all that stuff, right? And all the pain in the ass of like actually doing the work. And like, why are you like stopping outsourcing that, especially when you have no scale, right? Like this guy's selling, I don't know how many cases a year, but not enough to be at scale.

He's not Budweiser. And like, so you're subscale and you decide you want to go like take what is beautiful about your business and ruin it by buying a bunch of equipment you have to maintain and depreciate and finance and all that kind of stuff. But so anyway, long story short, like the way this guy has this set up, like freaking genius. Like go find excess capacity and have them make it for you and it may cost you a bit more. But man, like you avoid so much asshole. Well, and there's a family here regionally who spent $25 million converting an old abandoned building into a massive production brewery. And they put a label on it. You know, hey, it's got a brand name and we're going to hire a master brewer and all this kind of stuff.

And then they don't have any brand awareness. They're starting from ground zero. Meanwhile, there's a very lean family-owned brewery brand, beer brand that said, hey, well, we, you have a bunch of capacity. can we start brewing there because we don't own $25 million worth of production? Right. And it's a match made in heaven, but you're right. Like stay lean. Do if you have a great brand and great product awareness and you're already on the shelves,

why do you want to go own the expensive immovable stuff? Or like, I mean, there's so much risk in making this stuff. Like you make it wrong and you blind people. I know that's an extreme thing. Or you get the wrong wood and it happens to have been treated with some crazy Chinese chemical. or something. Like, there's just so many things that can go wrong. Like, why'd you just make that somebody else's problem?

Anyway, I think we're finally agreeing there. Okay, let's go back to the fact. Let's go back to the biggest problem with this business. It appears to be 100% dependent on Mr. Boone to keep being an artist and not a creep and promoting us. Like, is there any way, you and I had never even heard much less of this guy, but not even of this brand. Like, is there any way, like, like, they.

there is any value to this business as Mr. Boone is not promoting it? I mean, talk about key person risk. You know, now I will say, I think it's worth splitting hairs here. And there's a leaf blower going on in the background. I don't know how loud that is on your end. But there is a difference between, you know, his marketing via his own personal brand and social media and concerts and the actual distribution that's going on here. He lists on his, on his Boone's bourbon website, he lists, locations, I think is what he calls it.

And the locations are not actually like go to, you know, total wine. It's in South Carolina, it's the first one on the list, R&C. They are the second largest liquor distributor, beer and wine and liquor distributor in the state. Same with Georgia, R&C. He lists them by state, but it's not an actual, it's not an actual store, right? These are, it's a, there's a three-tier distribution. There's the manufacturer, the distributor, and then retail. Right.

So it's impressive in one sense that he's, you know, gotten such broad dispersion across these different brands. But what you find is that in order to actually really move product, you've got to go and spend pretty intensive dollars. You've got to have people on the ground in the liquor store saying, hey, do you want to try some of this? Or going to restaurant owners and saying, hey, do you want to put this in, you know, in your bar? And it's very limited shelf space, very limited kind of, you know, attention. and it's a very crowded market. So I like the fact that it's got some kind of differentiation. And like you alluded to,

there's a lot of people who've done this, George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds, The Rock. There's actually one, I just saw the headline this week in South Carolina, in Charleston, it wasn't bourbon.

It was like gin or something that Jeremy Renner, Hawkeye and the guy of mayor in Kingstown, he lost like a million dollars investing in this like up-and-coming brand. And the guy just took, you know, took people's money and kind of went missing. So it could go south fast for a lot of different reasons. And it's pretty dang fragile.

All right. Let me give you the other side of this. I think there's an asymmetric bet to be made here. Worth considering. Let's say you buy this business and you do what you need to, which is Mr. Boone becomes your promoter. Ideally, he's probably your partner, right? Let's say you buy 70% of this. Like, I think that's the way to make it work.

So he's incentivized and aligned. there. But let's say Mr. Boone, like suddenly breaks out and has a couple of hit singles and he becomes the next Sabrina Carpenter and is opening up for Taylor Swift when she works, when she works her way through Tennessee. By the way, have you heard Sabrina Carpenter? She's really good. I'm a big fan. I don't think so. This isn't my, this isn't my genre, though. You need to wake up and spell the pop music, Mills. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, I will Google it as soon as we quit hitting. She's got some cute songs. It's really interesting.

And then that's led me into another dark rabbit hole, which is there are these like music nerds who make shorts and videos analyzing pop songs and like connect them back to history and how all this stuff happens. It's really very interesting. And so they'll like, you know, find samples or like dig into is this just a remake? Like, you know, is, um, is Miley Cyrus copying a Glory Gainer song? Like, it's just super interesting stuff. Anyway, so let's say our boy here, our man, he's man, let's say he gets a couple hits under his belt.

And then suddenly we've got a $15 million brand here as opposed to a million dollar brand. Look, is it going to happen? Maybe, but is it not going to happen? Well, it's not a 0% chance. Well, and I think it like, okay, how much is he selling today, right? If they're saying he's doing a million dollars in revenue, this stuff's 50 bucks a bottle, you know. So in a way, I don't, I don't know that he's really proven. The skeptic in me says, has he proven that he can actually convert stardom into sales?

Right. I mean, 20,000 bottles, that's a lot. It's a lot of bourbon. But not to push back, but I think it's kind of amazing. The dude's got 4,000 Twitter followers. And he sells a million dollars over the bourbon. Like, that's pretty, like, come on.

Like, that's pretty good. And maybe he's bigger on the Instagram. Like, I'll go look. He may have a million followers on Instagram. That's my... Then he's laughing at us. He's like, yeah. You're still like by my bourbon brain, you idiots.

All right. But then think about, like, the key person risk, you know? So it is asymmetric upside. But there's also the go to zero risk. Like, if, you know, a video comes out on social media, like he just got a DUI. That would really be bad for the brand. Or if he, you know, is abusive or like, oh, yeah.

I mean, there's so many different. What is the 11,000? He's got 11,000 followers on, on Instagram. And this is just for the bourbon itself, but not for Tyler Boone. So here, where can I click on Tyler Boone? I totally forgot the guy's name. Tyler Boone. Is this him?

This has got to be him here, 54,000 followers. Okay, good for him. That's pretty good. Yeah, so let's see. He looks like he's doing some multiple things here, but yeah, he's got 54,000 followers for his Instagram.

So that's pretty good. Basically like he's making 20 bucks per follower per year in bourbon revenue. Yeah. Look at the first image. Tyler Boone, Building a Music and Burbin Whiskey Empire in 2024. The year is looking bright for the entertainer and business person. I think that Tyler is looking for a growth equity partner.

Yeah. And chose a broker who is just, right. It looks like they're trying to sell the entire thing. Now, we haven't signed the Sims, so we don't know. They could, we could get more detail and there could be a much more elaborate pitch with like pref equity and, you know, kind of non. undilutive to Tyler. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Yeah, this, I mean, this, have you ever looked at like how these, a lot of these 360 deals look or how a lot of these brand licensing deals look? No, no, no. So I'm going to just tell you conceptually how a lot of them work. And it's super fascinating. There's been big businesses built around this. So if you go look at like Shaquille O'Neal, for example, he doesn't own all of Shaquille O'Neal, right?

He went and like many other people, like we're familiar with what happens when David Joey dies or Elvis dies. Like somebody buys his estate and then they just like own it and they own his likeness and they monetize it. But what a lot of the other new deals look like and Shaquille O'Neal is one of the ones I read about, he only owns like 35% or 40% of Shaquille O'Neal. He sold the rest of Shaquille O'Neal for like $250 million to a company. And that company's job is to go get a return on that $250 million by monetizing

Shaquille O'Neal and doing things like putting them up for commercials, licensing his name, taking equity ownership and things like that, that big chicken. You know, you've seen his big chicken franchise? Like, he ain't making no chicken recipes. Hi, Heather here. When I'm not breaking down deals with these guys, I'm helping people get the right SBA loans for their business acquisitions. Because when you're buying a business, the best financing isn't one size fits all.

There's the best rate, fastest to close, the specific loan structure that you need, or a little of all of those things. That's why my company, Vizzo Business Capital, works with over 30 different lenders to find you the best funding in less time and with less friction so you can focus on the deal. Sign up for a free live Q&A session on SBA loans at VizoCAP.net. Then click Zoom sign up in the top right corner. That's V-I-S-O-C-A-P.net and click Zoom sign up. You just put his name on it and it's Shaquille O'Neal's chicken brand, right? So there's all kinds of way those things get structured now.

And a lot of these living artists and living famous people have started to sell themselves. So to some extent, I think this guy is looking for a partner like that to come in and like do that while he plays the guitar, which is probably a good specialization there. So that's called 360 in essence because it's like, hey, whatever you touch, Tyler, like we, we want to put your face on ketchup bottles at some point. and maybe there's some governance and controls, but we're going to give you a lump sum up front, and then we want to kind of use the runway that you have and the stardom that you have to recoup our investment and then earn a return.

Yeah, so let me pull it up here. It's actually a 360 deal as defined is where, and I Googled it. So it's a bit different because obviously Shaquille O'Neal, while he was a rapper for a while. It's definitely not a musician. He's a personality. but a 360 deal is a legal contract between a record company and an artist that involves the artist's income from all aspects of the work, including merchandise, revenue sponsorships, fan sites, and songwriting. So you go to, you go to somebody and you may not own it. You may not own 60% of them, which is, I think these can get structured in all kinds of different

ways. You may not own that, but you may, you may have a deal where you're just like, look, for the next five years, we are in charge of all of this, all of your monetization of this stuff, and we're going to be your partner through that whole thing. The other thing I'm talking about is this ownership structure is there. This 360 deal may not involve that, if that makes sense. So I guess you think about how do you kind of reverse engineer? They want $3 million up front. It's currently netting $300,000 a year, again, just based on the info that we have. And so you're betting that you can probably grow it more quickly so that you don't have 10 years worth of tail risk on, you know, Tyler or the bourbon brand or, you know, the country music, just all the different things.

What do you think about this crowdsourced $200,000 worth of kind of growth equity? I'm not opposed to it. I mean, it's, you know, Kickstarter-type stuff is there. So I would be curious if I were to dig into this deal to understand what they gave up, you know, to become partial minority owners. What does that mean? Is it like the Green Bay Packers, you know, partial minority owners? It's a club and you're a member. It's a total crap.

It's a lifetime membership. But you get no, you don't even really get. going to share. So is it more ceremonial or is it a real thing? You know, what, what is it done wrong? This is the messiest, you know, cap table and governance structure in the world. Yeah. So you want to look and understand what that looks like. Hopefully he got good legal, you know, and business advice as part of that before doing it. So I would definitely double click on that before I did anything. But I think, you know, for this to work, you need to understand, okay. I'm buying this thing.

They want $3 million for something that cash flow is $300,000. The only way this level of risk makes sense is if you can grow the thing. And I think you have to go in and understand, okay, how am I going to monetize this person's fame and his distribution in order to do that, right? And that's like, oh, cool, yeah. Like, I'll just like tell him to tweet more, right? That doesn't work, right? There's a whole science to this stuff where you're calling and getting him. on the right radio stations, you're getting in place

in the right tours, you're confronting the right people, sometimes you might have to pay to do that. You're potentially doing bundling things where somebody, you know, you're paying Spotify to give out free coupons of this type stuff. Like that is a science and an art that like

us two yokels know nothing about. I just tell you, I don't know nothing about that and it sounds really hard, especially if I know nothing about it. So I think to make a deal like this work when you're buying for 10 times cash flow with a key man risk, this, you need to have a freaking investment thesis that is pretty darn strong. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've talked about it on previous episodes because I remember you telling me some kind of fascinating stuff,

but the list of awards at face value, it's like, oh, wow, you know, they did really good. They got double gold in, you know, Las Vegas. I think we talked about it with a wine deal where it's like, is it just all pay to play? That was, I don't know if it's all pay to play. I mean, the very first listing is Forbes, which is the most promiscuous, permiscuous. Perman mischievous national publication in history. If you give them $1,000, you could be featured in Forbes. And they might, depending on if it's the end of the quarter, they might take $500. So that's going on here.

Yeah, and I think you're doing a recall back to my absolute favorite episode that we ever did amongst all the other ones, including the Lego minifigs and the brothel in Costa Rica, which was when we did the wine rating scam slash business. Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, one of my favoriteest businesses of all times, favoritest of all time. People pay you to drink their wine and then make BS opinions about it. So it calls to mind this idea, right? So it's okay.

So if you don't actually have any differentiation from an objective third party rating service, and then you're really kind of hitching your wagon to what happens to an individual's career, it stands to reason that like there could be a faster horse, right? There could be somebody else who's doing this same thing with a different brand. And I'm thinking of Connor McGregor, the MMA fighter who has kind of had a up and down kind of storied career. But he all the time in these video clips, he has his own whiskey brands. Yeah.

Proper 12. I just Google it. I couldn't remember off the top of my head. But he's like, you know, proper 12, proper 12. And he's just like railing about this stuff. I wonder if it is something very similar. where, you know, he's just like, hey, I've got to hit a certain quota in order, you know, for this thing to cash flow or to, you know, make my investors happy or whatever it is. But you got somebody who, I mean, Connor McGregor's got, I think, you know, millions and millions of followers.

Right. Is it just, hey, we need to bet on the fastest horse or we need to bet on the most undervalued horse who might, you know, have this massive asymmetric upside? That is my suspicion here. My suspicion here is the reason no one's done a 360 deal with this guy is he is just too small to matter. Yeah. And like, I don't know how much you watch it, but St. Antonio here lately over the past five years has just had a massive explosion of small music venues. So we get all these hand-to-mouth touring acts coming through all the time, selling 50 to 100 tickets a night, barely, you know, making it from one city to the next on gas fumes. and this guy may be a little bit further ahead of those guys,

but it's not much, right? You know, even the folks that are playing some of our bigger, like, thousand-person venues, like, they ain't killing it, that's for sure. And my suspicion is this guy is just in the Goldilocks zone where he's not big enough for this to make sense from a 360 standpoint. And also, you don't want to be too big, right? Because Taylor Swift ain't selling whiskey. No, there's too much brand, you know, risk.

So there's somewhere in the middle that you're doing that. And like that's my suspicion with this guy is once you look at how monetizable he is, the majority of people that are, you know, just the economics don't work. It's like a tiny VC fund or a tiny hedge fund. Like the economics just don't work to go and invest in a guy like this. So, you know, his only hope is probably just waiting until he has some more hit songs or he gets more entertaining on social media or some combination thereof. the whole celebrity alcohol thing is is interesting i wonder if we're kind of late in the game

ryan reynolds had that exit aviation gin right that i don't know i can't remember start to finish it wasn't very long and he he kind of was like you know founder co-founder but there was obviously some like groundwork that was laid before he got involved and they sold for like six hundred million dollars yeah um in a relatively short amount of time and so i i i I'm wondering if we're kind of seeing the downstream effects of that phenomenon, you know, George Clooney selling tequila, Ryan Reynolds selling gin. Right. And here we are. Like it matches the brand.

And like, kudos to him for for making. I mean, heck, Michael, this could be funding his music endeavors. Yeah. That's the other thing about this is like, dude, the guy's making $300,000. He's got negligible investment. It's just like free money that you throw in over the top of what he's doing. I can see why he wants $3 million for it. It's like at a certain point, you're just like, yeah, like, this is going to pay my agent

and all that kind of stuff and, you know, run my social media account. So yeah, I totally, I'm totally there with you. There's one last thing to hit on on this, which is how do brokers find buyers and, or how do brokers find sellers? In this case, you got a guy who's in Tennessee, a brand that is based in Charles. and a broker who's based in California. Yeah. And just from looking at Wayne's active listings, he is not like just the distillery guy.

He's not just the spirits guy. He's got all kinds of listings. Yeah. He has like a gun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all that.

It's huge. $30 million. Look, I think that's the other kind of red flag about this whole thing, which is clearly somebody who is, you know, like our friend here, Mr. Boone, is going to be somebody who could go and he's got an entertainment lawyer and he's got an agent and the community of people that do this kind of small scale like 360 deals or do this kind of brain. It's pretty small. So you're going to ask yourself, like, why is this on Biz Buy Sell listed by a guy in Santa Monica? You know, is it his cousin? I don't know. but it's definitely like if you want to understand the

basically the story behind any sale or any deal that you're going to do like why am I the lucky buyer? It's not immediately apparent here. Yeah. Man, so much to talk about. Yeah, so what did they think about this on Twitter? I didn't see that. I don't know.

I don't remember. Let me see who originally posted it. It shows you how much Twitter has become toxic for me in the past couple months. This is horrible. A guy named Christian Louvieri, at C. Louvie, any ETAers want to group up to make the official bourbon of ETA. And then they tagged SMB attorney and Kevin Anderson. And it seems like there was, Kevin Henderson just said 10x. No, thanks.

Oh, yeah. I think that's interesting. So I think people immediately were scared by the price. A bunch of value shoppers on Twitter. How dare they have a little vision, you weaners. I say that I've always been like, two times earnings,

way too expensive. There's too much risk. Can't do that. I was in a meeting with a broker the other day, and they were like, well, Mills, you always low ball with the seller. And I was like,

geez, come on, man. Out in me before I can even write an I-O-I. There is a correct, there's a correct retort to that, which is, you know,

I structure deals that can win for everybody, and I don't like to retrade. Like, if you want a buyer, if you want a buyer who's kind of jerky around, give them a call. I'll still be here ready to do the deal when you're ready to go. But I'm not going to bullshit you to try to get you to sign an LOI to me and play games. And get exclusive. Yeah. Yeah. So whether they believe it or not, I've tried that. It works sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, people know, they don't know until they get burned, right? And then they're like, oh, this is what it feels like for somebody that have retraded for six months. And now, you know, I'm that much more fatigued and I'm that much more ready to just take whatever the next deal is. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's nothing like going through three months of answering a person's bunch of questions. And they're like, okay, well, that'll be three times earnings is what we're going to pay. There's been times where somebody makes a lowball offer like that. And I, you know, my brother and I have a funny line where it's just like, I'll tell you what, you make, I will buy anything you have with the same characteristics at that price. I don't need to do any diligence.

I'll just do a key to the shotgun deal. And I will, I will reverse you like the Uno card on any one of these things. And it, they, nobody likes that response. That's a great tool. I mean, a lot of, a lot of M&A attorneys when they're structuring corporate governance will, we'll use that. Shotgun provision. Like, hey, you make me an offer for my shares, you know, 50, 50 partners or whatever. Right. The kind of easy out is if I offer you to buy out your 50% at X amount of dollars, you also have to be willing to sell your 50% for that same X amount of dollars. And it keeps things kind of honest and all part all right okay well let's give a let's give a thumbs up thumbs down on this one i'll go first i'm thumbs up but it is a very narrow market of people that can do this very super narrow

market like you you need to be the unicorn buyer and i'm not sure they exist but other than that it's terrific for somebody else if you like i'm almost imagining it's like thumbs up i want to know more And it would be interesting to have a conversation, probably with Wayne. I don't know that you make it to Tyler, but to find out, like, what is the, what's the story behind the story here? And if you were somebody who had like the next tier up of distribution, even beyond Tyler, like with fame or with the liquor distributor or with, you know, if you run a country music festival or something, something where you could just really pour gasoline on this, I think you could, you could probably structure this correctly and really take a pretty fair bet. An interesting play, which I don't know if anybody's done it, would be if you owned a distillery like this, to go and say, I'm going to go create the next Tyler. I'm going to do a Tyler in a box and do the label, do the brand, teach them how to distribute it, like sign a contract with them on how to do it, do a profit share and like be a partnership with them. Like you have to imagine if Tyler, who has 11,000 followers on Instagram, like I almost have 11,000 followers on Instagram.

terrible on Instagram. Well, no, that was the bourbon brand. He has 54. Oh, he has 54. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, like, you go to these folks and let's say, you know, you, there's got to be 5,000 tylers out there, like by themselves, that's kind of lame. But if you like put together like a system where you start to market their stuff, you give them a brand, you sign standardized contracts, you, you know, you get it all out of the same kind of distillery. You teach, you tell them, you tell them what to say in the concerts, like you ship it to their venues. Like there's all kinds of things that could be done if you already owned one of these, uh, one of these, you know, micro distilleries.

And then you turn that, turn these people into your distributors and, and marketing. Well, and there is this interesting thing that happens with people who move like ridiculously quickly around social media events, um, and, and around like hits. So there's a country music star, Lane Wilson, who has some song, it's like watermelon moonshine or something. If somebody is not already making watermelon moonshine, William Wilson's huge. She's become like the fastest up and coming country star. If somebody's not already making watermelon moonshine for her, it is a huge, you know, lost opportunity, a huge airball.

So I'm just thinking there's got to be something like that happening. Oh, yeah. Let's see. What does what does Twitter search come up with or Instagram search? there she is lany wilson what a pretty lady she is she like i think has won a bunch of country music you know new artists of the year she's not brand new but she's been around for a little while but you know there's got to be somebody who's already doing that there's this girl who's going around i don't want to here it is she's got the old smoky tennessee watermelon moonshine yeah

there's this girl who's going around twitter right now for this viral video hawk Hawk to a girl or whatever. The Hawk 2. Yeah. So did you see how quickly, though, how quickly she had hats? She partnered with somebody, like within 48 hours of going viral and she's got hats. The nuts thing about the Hawk 2 girl is there were, there is, it is rarely that a meme from one platform jumps over to the other one. Yes.

And this was like maybe once, maybe twice this year that a meme has jumped from TikTok to, Twitter. And it's like, okay, to some extent, kind of unbelievable that it's that being. But man, that interview, I just think out I don't have daughters. Yeah. I do. And I'm worried. Because you can tell, it's like, it's literally a guy walking around like downtown Charleston or downtown, you know, New Orleans.

Yeah. Just interviewing people on the spot. And it's just a lot of things that could go wrong. Unfortunately, I mean, the things I'm reading on. TikTok about her is unfortunately she was a kindergarten teacher and she lost her job. Yeah. Yeah, I did see something about that. I don't know. Maybe she'll make it up in hat and teach her yourselves. I think, I don't know. I mean, it's also kind of one of those things just like, why do she need to leave her job over that, you know? It's not like she murdered somebody.

Do you think she got like intellectual property protection quickly enough or do you think somebody else? has already trained. There was an open question about how you spell Hawk Tua. You know, like I was like,

when she was doing it, I was like, how do you spell Hawk Tua? And yeah, evidently there's a way. We went on a very meandering path.

We didn't have Bill or Heather here to keep us on the rails, but we covered some interesting ground today. Best episode ever. All right, well,

I don't think we record two episodes today. Thank you, everybody for listening. This was actually terrific. I enjoyed talking to you Mills and it was a great deal. You know what? You know what's coming in the mail to you Michael? A hawk to a t-shirt? Watermelon moon-shan. Watermelon moonshats coming your way. Oh, I'm not drinking these days so we can put it down in the liquor cabinet. It'll just be a conversation piece. You leave it on your kitchen counter and people

are like, what the hell is that, Michael? Uh, watermelon moonshine. All right, everybody, tell your friends about this episode. If you hated it, tell them you hated it. If you liked it, tell me I liked it. We'll see you next week.