Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - This VR Biz Trains Forklift Drivers... and Makes Bank

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

In this episode the hosts evaluate a $2.1M virtual reality forklift training business generating $600K+ in annual profit and debate whether it’s a durable industrial SaaS opportunity—or a niche hardware rental play facing automation headwinds.Business Listing – https://flippa.com/12243476-8-y-o-virtual-reality-training-and-workplace-development-platformWelcome 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.Looking to build a professional website in minutes? Try Wix: https://wix.pxf.io/c/6898629/3115214/25616?trafcat=templateHubSpot is the backbone for how businesses scale without chaos. Try them out here: https://go.try-hubspot.com/OeG9Vr💰 Sponsored by:Capital Pad – A platform connecting accredited investors with vetted small business acquisition deals. Discover exclusive opportunities at https://capitalpad.comFRANZY - Thinking about buying a franchise instead of an independent business? FRANZY is a free platform built for acquisition-minded entrepreneurs who want to explore franchise ownership without broker bias. FRANZY matches you with franchise opportunities based on your capital, goals, and lifestyle—and includes free coaching from experienced franchise operators. If you're exploring ETA but want a structured, system-driven alternative, check out https://franzy.com/This week, the hosts review an 8-year-old Georgia-based virtual reality forklift training company listed for $2.14M on Flippa. Founded in 2017, the business generates approximately $50K/month in profit (~$600K annually) with 66% margins and a 3.5x earnings multiple. The company sells VR forklift simulators and software licenses to technical colleges and industrial clients, combining hardware kits with recurring licensing revenue.Key Highlights:- Asking Price: $2.14M (3.5x profit, ~2.3x revenue)- Location: Georgia-based VR forklift simulator company- Strong presence in technical college systems- Hybrid hardware + software model (not pure SaaS)- Major debate: long-term viability vs. automation & robotic forkliftsSubscribe 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]

Welcome to Acquisitions Anonymous. Today's episode is a fascinating one. Mills, as you know, is volunteering with the entrepreneurship through acquisition class at the University of South Carolina. And they went and found deals for us to do it. And we did one of them today. And you'll see how we felt about it. Maybe it'll be educational when they watch this episode and see what they thought about it.

But it was a fascinating forklift and VR training deal, which we all came to consensus about. relatively soon. So here's the episode. Let us know what you think. See you by. Hello, another episode of Acquisition Anonymous. We don't have 100% beers anymore. And thumbs downing on just the plus inventory line. 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'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. Hello, dear listener. I clicked records too soon before Mills had the chance to pull the deal up. He said we have a deal. And then Michael went, right, click record. Let's go. Well, I don't know if you've noticed my outfit today, but I brought out, it's a little cold.

Do you know? One of my old school track suits? I've had this for like 20 years. If I ever have to dress up for Halloween as an Eastern European soccer hoodlum or soccer coach, I wear this. So if you're on audio only, it's Adidas, a black track suit with white stripes on it. That is awesome. Heather, your hair, your hair looks freaking amazing. I don't know what's going on, but it's one of those days.

You know what's really important is I got a 93 sleep score. So watch out today. I didn't realize that there was a correlation between sleep score. I think so. Like it's a whole attitude. Everything changes. Everything's better. Is this your bedhead?

Like, because it is 7.30. Pacific time. Or did you get ready? Yeah, it's only 7.30. So Mills, Mills has a. a deal. Okay, so I do have a deal. I let you guys know that the University of South Carolina Moore School is, they launched an ETA class and they are using the podcast heavily in the class. So I went spoke to the class last Friday and part of their homework was to listen to a bunch

of episodes ahead of time and then they kind of did a competition to pick a deal for us to talk about on the podcast. So Brandon Mendez is the professor and he's sent me this last night at 1040. He was working late into the night. And this is the quick background here. He says, my class selected a business listing for you guys to cover on the podcast. They were really interested in the idea of using virtual reality to make training more efficient and less costly. I had experience with this during naval flight school. Due to parachuting injuries, the Navy moved away from, quote, the redneck palis parasailing model, which was where you hook students into a parachute harness and use a Jeep to pull you and get you airborne,

then disconnect you and you float to earth and perform a parachute landing fall. So they found a deal on Flippa that is a virtual reality parachute. So we're going to talk about that. What's interesting. Wait, could you slow down and describe this redneck parachuting thing again? Because I did not. This is not firsthand experience, Michael. I don't have a video.

Like, how does this work? They hook you. Okay. So they put you and your instructor in a parachute behind a Jeep and they drive you through a field until you get up in the air. And then you get lift. And then you disconnect and you like parasailing without water. I'm shocked that they had injuries related to this activity. I mean, Gertley, you're from Texas.

I don't know if you've done this, but, you know, here we'll do this with like sleds in the snow, right? You get behind a Jeep and they tow you and you try not to die. Yeah. No, I know exactly what you're talking about. We do it behind boats. It's called water skiing, but the difference is when you fall down there, you hit some water from three foot up as opposed to the ground from 30 meters up, which is totally different. I'm looking at this for the first time. So I don't know if this is related to this or if that was just the hook that Brandon used to get us talking about this.

So hang on one second. Let me share my screen. This is on flip-up. what Brandon did was he he created a web scraper to screen through Flippa and then like created some methodology using AI to evaluate and like scrub the listings and kind of gave them a list. He sent me the spreadsheet of the top 50, but we can talk about that another time. So this is what he sent me. This is on Flippa and it's a SaaS business.

It says eight plus year old virtual reality training and workplace development platform. It's located in Georgia. The website is nine years old. They profit $50,682 a month. Their profit margins are 66%. They get 14,878 page views a month. And it looks like they are, okay, so the asking price up here is $2,142,142,000. which is a 3.5 times profit multiple or a 2.3 times revenue multiple, and they say their overall

churn is 10%. I have not signed an NDA on this, and I'm not a premium buyer and skipping the NDA, but there is a description here. So this says a U.S.-based virtual reality company founded in 2017 specializes in immersive simulation for training and workforce development, operating in the education and industrial safety sectors, the firm's proprietary product, a virtual reality forklift simulator, supports educational institutions and commercial clients with 85% gross margins on educational licenses. The company has demonstrated strong profitability. Currently, the business is run by a two-person team. Its offerings include a premium VR simulator, a mobile version, a web and iOS app, and live remote trainer connectivity. Revenue stems from hardware sales,

and software licenses, primarily through educational and commercial licensing models. The firm's customer base spans career and technical education, workforce development, commercial entities that has established significant contracts, including deployment across a statewide technical college system and initial installations with high-profile commercial clients. The expansion pipeline targets new regions and industries with further growth anticipated in international markets. Business thrives without paid marking, relying on on organic growth and direct outreach. Strategic growth opportunities exist in commercial expansion, replication, and additional states, international market penetration.

The founders seeking a capital-backed acquisition to scale operations have initiated a sales process. Assets offered in the sale include all relevant intellectual property, hardware inventory, and a well-documented transition plan. The advisory firm handling the sale specializes in digital company transactions and provides comprehensive of M&A services for interested parties. in the technology sector. There's a lot more information here, but it is all blurred out because I didn't sign the India. So this, I guess, is not actually a redneck parachute substitute,

but that was what Brandon said it made him think of because it's forklift, virtual reality. How does the business work? Travis, do you understand this? I think they're selling training where you sit in a little virtual reality simulator and learn how to drive a forklift, and their customers are, I don't know, warehouses and people like that who want to train their people

before they let them loose in a warehouse full of billions of dollars worth of inventory. So they don't show up on YouTube with those great videos where like everything's collapsing and people are right. Yeah. So I guess my question, Mills, why? So they say they want to sell to somebody who's going to invest capital to help them grow. Like training is a asset light business. Like, why do they need a bunch of capital to help them grow? I don't understand that.

I bet this, the piece of hardware that they're talking about, the simulator is probably pretty expensive. And if you put one, like the technical college thing is super interesting to me. That like has all of my attention. All these technical colleges offer forklift certification classes because if you walk into a business and say I'm forklift certified, doesn't mean you're actually good at the forklift. It just means you sat in an eight hour class sometimes online that costs like 200 bucks. and you can make 15 bucks an hour, you know, after having done that. So it's like driving a car without actually driving a car.

You're just a teenager hopping on. But I think that obviously if I'm the, you know, provost of the technical college and I can make, you know, I don't know, $85,000 investment to forklifts are expensive in and of themselves. So if I could have an actual, you know, module or like a piece of equipment, fake equipment that somebody could sit in and learn and make them that much more proficient, I think this makes a lot of sense in the technical college world. I think you would have to be a massive warehouse operator in order for this to make sense and, like, have one in your warehouse to train people on. But I really like the technical college piece of this. Did anybody see the video online of robotic forklifts where they like just go under the palette and like lift it up like an elevator? So I just recently saw that.

It was fascinating. And when you watched it, you're like, okay, yeah, it's moving around the warehouse like a Roomba. I mean, I'm sure its capabilities are limited just based on how it was designed. But it does feel like that's worklifts in general then are on the table to be disrupted. by technology. Have you guys seen the Shanghai port, the videos of that? It's the entire thing's automated. Like, no one's driving around these things. It's insane to watch. There's no union there. You're saying, Travis? Exactly. But yes. Well, I think, I mean, it's interesting if you look at how the different unions across the globe approach stuff like that. Like, a lot of the European ports are unionized,

but they're the union leaders or like, my job is to protect the jobs of the people that we have. not protect what they're doing every day. So they're like, okay, well, let's automate and then let's figure out how to make this port more efficient so then more traffic comes through so then we can pay the longshore men and whatever and more money and maybe they have better jobs through automation. We protect those jobs and give better lives. Here we're like, no, no, you run a crane that was designed in 1984. We're going to make sure that job exists for the next 50 years doing exactly that.

So you never have to change or get trained. So I would say the union thing kind of depends on what geography you're in. Yeah. Big time. So I have a question. Has anybody done any of this VR training? Does it actually work? I've run a forklift, but I have not done virtual reality forklifts. Yeah, I think it's part of the problem with a lot of these things. Like, you know, I went and toured a big manufacturing facility here in San Toya the other day, and they have like 400 people working there. CNC machines everywhere, all computer operated, all that kind of stuff. Their entitled model for training is apprenticeship based. They bring in folks and they're like, okay, we're going to teach you how to actually do this stuff in practice.

Because the problem is in the classroom or virtual reality. Like, I didn't see one virtual reality headset. All I saw was a bunch of younger, hopefully folks, like shadowing the older guys around, learning how to do stuff. And that was how the model actually worked for the training for them. It wasn't classroom stuff. It wasn't watching videos. And definitely wasn't VR. One of the biggest risk in entrepreneurship through acquisition is buying a business with fragile systems.

Unclear demand are a single owner who holds all the knowledge. Franchising approaches that problem differently. You are buying into an established brand with documented systems, unit-level data, and repeatable operating playbooks. The heart part is knowing which franchises are actually worth evaluating. That's why Alex Moresniak, former CEO of Two-U laundry, built Franzy. Franzy is a free platform that helps acquisition-minded entrepreneurs explore franchise ownership without broker bias. You answer a few questions, and Franzy shows you franchise opportunities that align with your capital, lifestyle, and long-term goals. You also get free coaching from people who have actually built and scaled franchise businesses.

If you are exploring ETA and want to understand whether franchising fits your acquisition strategy, visit franzi.com. That's F-R-A-N-Z-Y.com. And thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode. I wonder how much of an actual SaaS company this is versus more hands-on instructional. Like not everyone's rocking around with a VR headset that would work with this. And the equipment, right? It's not like you're just not using an Xbox controller or something like that. you have to have something that mimics the forklift thing.

So it seems like there's going to be a hardware base to it as well. Probably quite minimal, I would assume, but. Which I do think they say, I do think they talk about a hardware component to this. But then it's not a SaaS business. It's a hardware and a supporting software business. Yeah, which fits the multiple. It's not, it's not priced like a SaaS business. Yeah.

And there's nothing wrong with that. If you can get your client to pay for the razor and then you sell them razor blades every month through the software, Like, that's a great business to have. Where it sounds like these guys are, is they're having to pay for the razor, and they give it to the client, and they're like, okay, well, cool. Now you pay us per month

and hopefully we'll recruit our initial investment of this VR setup we just gave you. That sucks, which kind of goes back to my core thesis with this business is, you know, why is it so small? And does VR training actually really work? And so, therefore, does anybody actually want to buy it? And this thing's 10 years old.

VR should have, this should be a much bigger business if there was true customer demand around it. It's not, which to me is scary as hell. Did it say something about like there's two people in the business? Is that what I remember? Yeah. You know, I have people hit me up with like different companies for like help all the time. And every time there's someone making an enterprise play, I'm like, hey, this is a great opportunity.

I have no idea how enterprise works. It's really hard is all I know. I can imagine some guys who really know forklifts deciding to go into this maybe don't have the enterprise sales pedigree that might be needed to. I don't know, get this in Amazon warehouses or something like that. That could be a nice expansion from there. If they're just, maybe they know these community colleges, that's the only way they're going. But there's a lot of corporates out there who might be willing as well. So this may or may not be the company.

I just Googled, but it's called forklipsimulator.com. And it actually, even if it's not, this is very indicative, I think, of what I was imagining. You're putting on a VR headset, but the actual kit that it comes with, is, you know, it pedals and it's controls and it's a steering wheel. Like it would very much mimic the forklift experience. And it comes in like a sturdy travel case. I don't know why this did it to me, but this just reminded me of the video game called Goat Simulator.

Heather, have you ever seen Goat Simulator? No, no, I have not. Okay, because I'm asking in particular, because I'm leading into a horse question here. But so Goat Simulator is like, a video game where you run around in the video game like you're a goat, but you're a goat who can kind of do crazy stuff and like you run around, you eat stuff, you bounce your head off of things. It's fascinating. So maybe think there is a market out there for horse simulator.

Oh, horse riding simulator. Horseback riding virtual reality. Yeah, you're right. Let me get on that. All right. So got to go. After this SBA loan brokering thing you're doing so well, You know, if you make billions from that, then you could go to the horse simulator. So, okay, over to you, Mills. Go back to goat simulator. I mean, forklift simulator. It was so easy. Virtual reality training center in Georgia, industrial safety forklift simulator.

Put that in Google. It shows the list of the community colleges. It's like, oh, come on. That's interesting because we found two different ones, though. So there is competition here. All right. Which is good. So it's a thing.

We didn't out. We didn't out, supposedly we didn't out the one. But I don't like it as much since there is competition. Like other people are already doing virtual reality training for forklifts. That's a really small Tam. Maybe it's bigger than I think. But even if you're splitting it up with three or four different people, what's your competitive advantage?

Maybe a cheaper entry price point for the hardware and lower, you know, recurring costs for the community college? More like an equipment rental business to me. That's what it's starting to feel like. you're renting out these kits. Yeah. They're in those specific schools because they have their relationships. And if they go.

A little bit of both. Yeah. Yeah. And probably if that's true, Travis, then there's probably customer concentrations that you have to worry about because this is only a million of revenue. And if it's mostly technical schools, you know, there could be a couple schools that make up a big percentage of that million dollars. Yeah. So these guys are taking home $50,000 a month. Yeah.

Let me state the obvious. Like, that's not bad. Yeah. You could buy a lot of horses with that. Right. It could pay for your horse hobby for sure. The problem is they want $3.5 million for it. From their part, right?

Like, what goes into operating this thing? Because this is the classic situation. Like, there's not a team. Like, you're buying a job. But sounds like there's a lot of extra margin around for doing a lot of things, really. Whether that's to install a team to run operational. I don't know what that consists of, or just doing it all yourself for a really nice high-paid job is there.

Yeah, I suspect you're spending a lot of time building custom courses per client and then hoping they continue to deploy that, you know, pay per month ongoing after that, which when it works, it works, you know, and it's working for these guys, at least to the point they're making $50,000 a month, which is a lot of money in any universe. One thing that stood out to me that's not really related to the deal itself is that Flippa has a link here for insurance. It's reps and warranties insurance, but they don't call it that. But there's this little thing here, verified eligible for M&A insurance. And when you click on it at first, it says coverage includes protection for up to 100% of the enterprise value,

which I think there are places that reps and warranties insurance matters and it can be very valid. It's pretty expensive. But when you actually get more info, all it is is reps and warranties. Basically, if the seller doesn't, if they tell you, hey, we've disclosed everything about the business and then you find that they haven't disclosed something, then, you know, and there's a breach of the reps and warranties, which they say right here. resulting from breaches or inaccuracies in the seller's representations or warranties, they'll cover up to the entirety of the purchase price, which the claims on these things, I think are really, really difficult to actually get damages from. But it's interesting that they've embedded this so seamlessly into the like flip a dashboard. Yeah, I think I know

which product this is because they've been out there trying to, it's kind of, they developed a product for small deals to get some form of M&A insurance. But like you said, it's limited. coverage and I don't think like making a claim has been tested because it's relatively new and it's always hard to make a claim on something like that. And then there's there's a whole other realm of people out there. It doesn't exist as a product, but that keep promoting that they want to, they want to have personal guarantee insurance, which I don't think is actually feasible. But I'll buy that. Which does not cover like I'm an idiot and I lost our biggest customer and my key employees. It's just somebody lied to me in.

the due diligence process and you know and you can prove it and you can prove they did it and that they intentionally did it it wasn't misinterpreting like that's the problem with all this rw i stuff or the board of directors like liability like insurance i have i have never seen like they should be paying they never pay never they don't i've like is it that's a great insurance business you take premiums make everybody feel good and then you never pay any claims like okay that's amazing And that's the whole, those whole businesses for these things. I've had one situation where they, I know they sued the seller. The seller did lie quite a bit.

They were able to document it because they did it on email, which is always funny because you turn that whole email system over to the buyer and they got access to all of it. But they sued and they won and they collected. I have never, it's one time I've ever seen it once. And you've been involved in thousands of deals. And usually what you get is an offset against the seller note. That's why seller notes are so important because you're not going to go get money back. You might be able to not pay the seller note, but you're not going to get money back.

But this one case, they got the seller note clawed back and they got like a couple million dollars that they collected from the seller because it was so egregious and so well documented. But it was a huge drag on the business and the business owner for like two years while they litigated it. Most people wouldn't have even taken it to court because it was so difficult. So I have a question for you guys on this deal. This is a business that looks like it should have massive tailwinds with VR, like blue collar training, all that kind of stuff. Does it have tailwinds or does it have headwinds? I think in a few years it has headwinds. Technology.

Yeah, why is that? Technology. I think it's just so obvious you can, this can be turned into a robot driving a forklet, a lot of it. That does compute. That totally does make sense as we move away from less human drivers and more just people overseeing things. I mean, look at the military now. They're recruiting gamers to fly the drones and whatnot. I know. I feel really bad for all the times I told my son to stop gaming. I've seen those videos of the forklifts in the Amazon facility. And instead of like a worker walking around to pick items from the shelves, it is like a mini forklift that just goes. under the palette and like raises it anomaly and it brings the palette to you and you take the

stuff off of it instead of you having to walk around. It's kind of crazy. But those are the more, and Amazon is outspending everybody in that field by many multiples. But yeah, I do think, I mean, the stuff that we do with Forklifts, I find it hard to imagine a scenario where it could be automated because you're in the middle of a construction site and there's a lot of variables and it's not like a smooth concrete floor where you could, you know, drive a Roomba. But I could see there being more maybe domestic manufacturing probably helps this business, but there's a lot of external threats. Humanoid robots, bro. We're betting our entire Tesla market cap on them. 100%. That's all they got left. All you got to do is drive one of those Yalmi cars. You're like,

okay, we're going to humanoid robots. I drive a Tesla full self-driving all the time. I love it. You do? What model do you have, Heather? I have the X, which they are no longer. going to make. And I use the full self-driving. It took, like, took my nervous system a while to get comfortable. There is a learning curve there of just getting relaxed about it. But once you do, and it keeps getting better and better, it is, it's wonderful. I love it. I could see the Chinese releasing like an open source version of that. Ford and everybody just scoops up. Does everybody do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the fascinating thing that's going on right now, you know, the Chinese are running a massive trade surplus and all the signs are there that they're trying to get through their economic downturn by flooding the world with goods.

There's a massive consumer surplus in these cars that are coming out because they're courtesy of Chinese debt that they're racking up to put these cars out at less than cost. Like it makes me sad that it's happening because it hurts American industry. But as a consumer, I'm like, oh, let's go. Like, this is great. Thanks for all the free stuff, Chinese government. So anyway. I totally recommend looking into the Chinese East. thing. Super fascinating. So everyone knows that the manufacturers are dumping overseas because they

had too much inventory. It's happening within the country too. There was something like, I don't know, like 100 EV manufacturers popped up and they were spending all they could to make these things, because obviously it only works at scale. But if you have 100 people competing for the same thing, they just started competing on discounts, on discounts. And like the Chinese government had to step in and be like, hey, stop discounting because they saw the collapse. Like no one's making money. They're selling the cars for less than they're making it for. Domestically, it's totally crazy as well. Totally look into it. It's fun. All right. I've got this way off the topic. Let's go back to horses. No, I'm serious. Let's go back to the deal. Sorry. I think this is like, it's an interesting business.

And I think they've built a pretty little viable business, but it just seems like there's too many external factors. But I think it's priced probably appropriately for what it is. Like, could this, you do due diligence on this and you find that they're installed base in this technical college network is pretty embedded. And if you grow it, it's an amazing opportunity. And if it plateaus, it's not a bad deal. We are coming up on time. Do you guys want to rate this one where you're at and who should buy it? I'm thumbs up. I would sign the NDA and I'm really curious about it. I don't think the purchase price is crazy for, you know, call it $600,000 a year in EBIT. It doesn't excite me, but if the person buying it has special insight here, or they evaluated the company and realize that current owners just weren't doing a lot with outreach and marketing, then it would get a lot more interesting for me. Yeah, I think that if a buyer felt they could get their money back, the purchase price back in like three years, it's a go. But otherwise, I'd be worried about the longer term. Yeah, and I think I'm where Heather is.

I think the buyer for this is somebody that's a strategic that's already in the space, whether they're a peer or something. slightly bigger vendor or somebody who's in the in the Midwest and wants to open up in the southeast. That totally makes sense. But I think there's, if you're a young entrepreneur who's in an ETA class, maybe in South Carolina or another state like that, like I think there's easier businesses to go after than this one. This one feels hard compared to some of the other stuff they could possibly do. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. Thanks everybody for being here. If you enjoyed this one, please tell your friends about my track suit. Hopefully they will respect me more than Milstead for wearing it.

Game, game. Catch you next time. Game with sex game.