The Game with Alex Hormozi - Can I Save This Failing Pack in 90 Days? | Ep 1008

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Download your free personalized $100M scaling roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube   Paul sank $22M into an indoor adventure park and had 14 days before running out of cash. In this episode of Scale or Fail, Alex identifies the cash flow constraint killing the business and helps him build the one offer that could buy it enough time to survive. 90 days later, summer camp revenue is up 325%, and admissions have doubled. More Value: Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas        Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle   Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured  Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/  Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi    Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training   DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026

bankrupt, as in $0 in his bank account. That's what this business owner just approached me with. That's going to happen within weeks, not months or years, weeks. And he's going to have to sink his entire life savings into it just to keep it going to the end of the year. And so I'm going to sit down with Paul to help him fix his adventure park that he's already sunk $22 million in, which is absolutely insane. And I'm going to give you a step-by-step roadmap on exactly what he needs to do to fix the business. And we're going to check back in within 90 days from now to see, A, is he still alive? And B, did the business get fixed?

But most importantly for you, if you're business owner, I've scaled 10 businesses to $10 million in revenue, $3 to $100 million plus. And I think the biggest lesson I've learned in this entire process is the tactics and principles that apply to this business apply to many businesses because businesses behave in patterns. So with that being said, let's dive into the business. What's having to everybody? So Paul, you're ready? Oh, we're ready.

All right. So tell me about the business. Yeah. My name's Paul Fontinelli, founder of Boulder Adventure Park. We are an indoor family entertainment center in Grand Prairie, Texas. The story actually started eight years ago. Okay. I dreamed it up.

I was working in corporate America, kind of uninspired at the time, wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I have three young kids. Wanted to get out of that and build a business. How much did you raise? Raised eight. Total cost is $22 million. Did you put the rest in? I put, well, raise eight, the rest was debt.

Got it. Who paid for the debt? Bank. That's a big loan. It is a big loan. That's part of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, no. Yeah, we will.

All right, so how does this thing make money? So we're 4.8, we're not profitable yet. That's one of our biggest challenges is the profitability of it. Our goal is to get the 10 million of revenue over the next few years, but what's really the goal, what we need to talk about today is the next 90 days. So I'll come back to that, but that's a really big piece of kind of what we're doing today. Streams of revenue. This is the money slide literally.

General admission, $32.46 per person with another $11. of in-park spend, they add on arcade, food and beverage, merchandise, you name it. This makes up about 70% of total revenue. Then we have a bunch of other groups in terms of church groups, social groups, et cetera. And then we literally just launched our summer camp campaign today. I assume one of the biggest things Alex is going to help help me work on is data and metrics I'm not crystal clear on at the moment. This is the, take my medicine slide.

I own this. I don't make excuses. The numbers that your team was asking help me prepare and realize where some of our deficiencies are. Yeah. It's really interesting for you because from a business perspective, it's like you're looking at outputs, not inputs. Yeah. So these numbers are inputs that create the outputs that you're accustomed to track. Because the core economic arbitrage of the business is LTVAC, right?

Like that's the core arbitrage that we expand out and then we just do it to infinity. So we actually start making a profit. Okay. Well, good to know. So problems. The bad is we are demand constrained, right? But the good news is we can 10x the opportunity. Capacity is absolutely there.

As you can see, peak days running at 50% of capacity, but emissions are down. We've had struggles with marketing, conversion rates, all of that is really been one of our challenges. And here's the final shit sandwich. We are cash constrained. I'm at the point now. I'm putting my 401K in, which I believe in this business. I believe in the upside. I believe in this opportunity.

and so I'm all in, which actually leads me to the next slide. This literally hit me yesterday, dude, and I was like, heard. You come, you fight for your life. You said it earlier, we have nine lives, right? Like, I might be towards the end, but I'm here, and I believe in it, and I know we've got the upside to make it happen. We've got 14 days, right? Yep, exactly.

Deep breath. No, I know. I feel for you. No, I appreciate it. The issues, there's so much going on. Absolutely. I promise I want to do my absolute best to try and help. I know you will.

So let me ask the other question, which is, what's your monthly nut that you need to make to break even? Well, it's seasonal. Yeah. We need to probably be at $550,000 a month. And you're at now? What? $400. Okay.

So you need $150. What's the debt service right now? Monthly. It's going to be probably about $180,000. Got it. So I'll tell you what I wrote down. So the first thing that we probably have to do is generate cash. And so what I want to do is sell basically the baddest offer that we could possibly imagine for a season pass to the list.

And that's because, like, if we don't do this, there won't be a season for them to come home to. So we need to generate some cash. May I suggest one idea of thing? Our summer camps is a huge opportunity to drive significant cash in a very short period of time. because the window that moms are booking summers is right now. So we're May, June, July, August. So those are kind of the four months ahead. Key, right?

But then it goes into the slow season. Slow season, yes. Right. So we need to do more than just good during this time period. So we've got 600,000 extra that this has to make just to get us to the bad season. Right? Correct. How big is the team, sales team?

Sales team right now is three people. Okay, because if we have, let's say, we have this month, if we were to announce tomorrow, basically because that's the time zone we're in i'm going to bet average chicken to be like 1200 bucks that's where our third offer was for two thousand dollars you can come any week any time oh so you can do five days a week the whole summer for two grand correct so basically buy four get 10 yep that was meant to be the grand slam offer that is compelling okay so and that way mom or dad just drop their kid off any day any day any time yep so let's say that the average ticket is 12 200 300 so if it's $1,200 is average ticket and they can close 15 of those a day We're looking at, called $16,000 a day, something like that.

So that would get us an extra $450,000. That's not enough. Well, the demand for summer is automatically going to boost revenue. I was optimistically shooting for about $200,000 in summer camps, and that would have been a win. If you and I can dial that in and get even close to what you're saying, it's going to put us in a strong position. I do like the summer angle because I think people will spend a lot of money for their kids.

Because if we decide that this is the offer, right, then we'll drive the whole email list here. I mean, honestly, you just need to hammer the list because it's now or never, right? We have to hammer the list. I think we take as much of that cash as we possibly can, and then we drive that back into ads. Love it. And then, again, feed it through. I love it.

So I want to get still a little bit clearer on the summer camp offer because we have kind of one shot at getting it, right? Yep. So current is 300, 4 times three, three days per week. Exactly. 500 times 5. Yeah. 2,000. And that's for the whole summer.

Correct. I'm going to pull the funnel up. This looks nice. I tried to follow your recommendations. It looks good. I like this. I like that. That's cool.

My big fear of the parent would be, is my kid going to fall and die? That's pretty big. Safety is our number one. Yeah, no. I think if we can accommodate that, this should probably drop off the page, this kind of header. Okay. Because it's not any value. Right.

It's the most valuable. estate on here. We also have like four banners. So we have this banner, we have this banner, we have this banner, and we have this banner. Yep. We want to have basically one banner. So it's like, what's the most important thing? Okay. I think this is probably the most important thing. Yeah. Because we want to let them know, we want them know the times. I think this can, we can get rid of this, this thing. This is basically a repeating of this. Yeah. So I'd get rid of both of these. Okay. I would put this Google review stuff. So you already have it here.

So I think you probably can just nix it. Yep. I do like this little badge. Basically, you want to put trust right next to the action. Okay. So you have this parent rating right around the button, so that feels okay. Yep. I won't put something around injury.

So like, do you know how many like hospital visits? I just want to show an obvious stat, which is like last year, zero false. Yep. I just put that. Okay. Because that's what I want to know. Okay. That's good.

I like that. Okay. That's really good because that's obviously like, what if he doesn't like it, whatever? Yeah, exactly. That's good. See, these are the reviews. It's like, I'd rather have that than the, than this one. Got it.

It's like, it's also relevant to the specific. Yep. A thing. That's good. And we are going to be a recording of VSL. Yeah, I was like, the only thing I think it needs is a video. Where would you put it? Probably right at the top.

Okay. So it would be like headline thing. And then, and then I would just cut all this. It looks like too much sex. It's like, that's the main part. So there's the funnel tweaks that I would make on the actual page. Now let's talk about like how we're going to drive traffic to that offer. So we have the brick and mortar.

So these are the flows. And like I'm only focusing on one thing because you don't have the luxury of time. Sure. And so you basically, we basically need to make one bet. The season past was my original guess, but I think summer is going to make more sense. Yep. So that's what we're going to run. Okay.

Okay. So we have our email list. Yep. As our sources of traffic. Number two, we have our attach general. admission tax rates. We can do that. What do you mean by attach rates? The emotion.

Okay. I can say motion. That makes easier. And then we have our paid ads direct. Okay. So if this is, these are kind of our four called our four flows that are going to run into this. Beautiful. Right. Yep. So on the paid ads, I'm going to say a unspeakable video clips. Okay.

as probably the first primary way of the actual creative for the ads. B is we want to have the offer, which I would experiment with buy four get 10 weeks free or get six weeks free. Okay. And that might fucking destroy. So yeah, it's good. Yeah, by four get six is pretty solid. I like that a lot.

That's pretty good. I would also, so 2,000 divided by 10 is 200. So as low as 200 per week. Okay. As another angle. Yep. I'm thinking about different front end. So if we're going to the front end.

All right. So we have a buy X, get Y free offer. Yep. Right, as a version of that. We have a, this is kind of the early bird. So I would use early bird as an angle. Okay. And then just pair it by four, get six.

also buy one month get whole summer. That's a good way to say it. Right? Yep. And the things, they all mean the same thing, but the one's going to convert back. It's one clicks, exactly. Yeah. So this is basically at Early Bird 2.

It's like, why is he doing that? Because Early Bird. It's like we have to always answer the reason why we're making an offer. Got it. So buy 4 get 6, buy one month, get whole summer. By one month, get two, free. Yep. That's good. If you want this to go mental, but the question is like, I'm only a little bit worried about your sales team's ability to actually, like, call all the leads. So this is probably what I would consider to be like the fundamentally sound way of approaching this. If you wanted to go ballistic, which we might just need ballisticness. I like the sound of it. Then we do do the full summer offer, right? We'll just call it $2,000 private summer camp. Private summer.

experience or camp giveaway. And so that means that one person that you pick gets the whole camp for free. This is first place. I don't have second place be like the core offer, which is $1,000 off. But the core offer is this. Okay, hold on.

So we can say the value. So if we have $500 a week times 10, so it's $5,000. Yes. Right? So $5,000. And then we could make this, second place is $3,000 off for the whole summer. Okay. That sounds sexy. Yeah, yeah. And then

let's run this. So $5,000 value. I get that. And then what's the $3,000 off the $5,000? Got it. So then it's the $2,000 ticket. Okay. So this is the first and second place prize. Okay. Make sure that you say more than one person can win second place just so you're, you know, legal and compliant. By all means, I'm not an attorney. Run this bag of your attorneys, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're responsible for your decisions and, you know, these results may vary in financial performance, etc. Okay. But just more than one winner. But at the end of the day, honestly, this is going to be the, this is going to be the humdinger. If you just lead with $5,000 private summer cramp, full summer experience giveaway, second place prize wins $3,000 off. We're offering a prize to give away summer camp every day this summer for your entire family, up to three kids.

Here's how it works. When you opt in, you're entering to win an, all summer camp pass for your entire family up to three kids. That means you can drop your kids off here at Boulder any day that camp is going on whenever you choose. This is an unbelievable offer valued at over $20,000 for up to three kids in your family. All you have to do is opt in to have a chance to win. Even if you don't win, everybody the option to enter is going to win a scholarship summer camp offer from Boulder. so your kids can have the best summer camp experience of their lives. Enter for a chance to win.

So you just need to use the word free. Otherwise, the rest of this is all really good. It's got good visuals. He's good energy. He started with the really expensive thing. So it's anchored so they know that it's going to be, you know, pricey if they want to buy. The only thing I would have done differently is I wouldn't say everyone is going to win a scholarship because that kind of removes the excitement out of the, you know, it's going to be a scholarship. out of winning or getting a scholarship.

So I would have just tweaked it so you just say more than one person can win and you have your first and second place prize. And you should have just said first place prize is this, second place prize is this. And then during the seven day count done done the drawing. And then that's when you contact people to say, hey, you got one of the second place prizes. Tiny tweak, but it makes a pretty big difference in conversion. But the actual creative itself, like the actual the energy, the vibe, the camera, like how they showed everything, really good.

Fundamentally sound. Because the thing is, is we have to run this fast because they got a, know if they're going to do it, right? So this is going to basically be seven day, like a seven to 10 day campaign. Okay. After you select the winner, you then call all these leads. Yep. To then sell them using the standard offer. Perfect. Which is this. Yep. And then basically you kick off the campaign that runs the page that you just want to. Okay. And then you'll call all those leads. Yep. So this will give you a flood of leads. It's going to be seven days. We're going to push the email here. We're going to push the paid, the paid ads to hear.

Love it. And then phones follow up. I'm going to draw this up for you. So we're going to have giveaway ads plus page. And this is just a landing page. Those are going to be great. All right. And you just want to have a countdown time right at the top because that's what creates the urgency around it.

And then with this, just send an email and text of how many days left until the drawing. Got it. And then on that day, pick one person. Congratulations you won. Yeah. And then everybody else. Hey, congratulations. one second price.

Yeah. Right. And then like, but then you have to put another countdown from the claim it, which is like our summer can's filling up. So in order to make, otherwise they're not going to claim it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have 72 hours to claim your second place. All right.

And that's when I'm sending in the landing page. Yeah. So seven day countdown and then 72 hours to claim second. Then after that, two, we fire off the buy, four, get six variations. that would just typeed over there. And then basically you have to run this until the cows come home. Yeah. And then on the thank you page for the giveaway,

make sure this is legal in your state. So this is not me saying this is legal. Make sure that the laws of your area allow this. On the thank you page, have an opt-in that says, do you have any other parents who have kids? You can send them this page. So just gives them a copyable link. And then they can forward it to a friend.

And for every person that you send to opt in, you get an additional drawing in the giveaway. Right. Because parents love when their kids go with their friends' kids. Yeah. Yep. So plus one referral ticket. And so here we go. So you're going to give away two of these, right?

So one goes to the winner. And if you're the person who referred the winner, you get it too. Awesome. That way they can. So if you just for yourself, yeah. If you just do it for you, you've got a shot. If you're for 100 friends, you have 100 more chances to win. Once we run this whole play, then we have to flip the campaign to this.

And this offer might have to change as the summer moves on. But I think this becomes the call it evergreen structure for the summer. This becomes the launch. And the benefit of this is that we're advertising the big number. And so when it gets dropped down all the way to 300 bucks, it feels like nothing. Right. And you're attracting people who want this big thing. And so you don't need to tell,

you don't, when you get on the phone, you don't have to sell them the big package. They already said they wanted it. I'm just, this is a master at work. You're so good at this. Yeah, I know, I know. Let's get it to work. Keep going, you're doing it.

But I think this is the best shot you have. I love it. I love it. But that's basically, this is how do we get you through? Because it, basically at the rate you're at now, you have 90 days of burn. But if we make money, then all of a sudden, that pushes out.

And like you said, then feeds the next business unit. Right. Yep. There's a lot of stuff, but there's only a few moves that are going to make you the amount of money that you need that's material. But yeah, that's it. It's brilliant. Cool.

We'll run it. And we will execute it. Alex, thank you. Appreciate you, man. No, I appreciate you. Sorry, you're a hard spot. That's okay. Smooth seas do not make a strong sailor, whatever the, where you go.

Pithy saying is. All right, let's look at where we're at the scaling world. How many employees do you have? A thousand? 150. Yeah. This business. So, that's so tough.

How many are like not just day workers? Yeah, good. Probably about 10. Okay. So that's probably more. I think that's really much. I think that's real estate. They look at it.

So you're like between these two phases, between prioritized and product size. Yeah. Basically, what we did here is we're spending more on Nishdowne messaging, which is the new, the new offer, right? Okay. We made something new to sell them, which is the product. Yeah.

Sales needs and materials. This can be the VSL. that work that you're going to put on the landing page. Yep. By the way, if you're curious, have you been through this going to roadmap before? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it good?

Oh, it's brilliant. Yeah. So I used it last night to prepare. There we go. So it's free. If you're a business owner, like, I don't know what phase them in. Each of these little squares has like a huge explanation behind it to know exactly where you're out for your business and how to apply it.

And again, it's all free. You can go grab it. What we did was you just bought him. If he executes everything, three more months to live. And so sometimes a lot of entrepreneurship is, just buying the next week, the next month, the next payroll. It's tough. I mean, you got to give it to him.

There's a lot of grit. Like, just, I mean, even at the end when he's like, I'll put my whole life savings into, like, what he saved his whole career as a, you know, in the financial field to doing this, like, I have a lot of respect for it. He may find that this offer just absolutely murders. I mean, it's the best shot I can think of, of how do you generate cash ethically within this season? And so if we can pull out of that cash for it, which is the whole purpose, the money models book. and that gives them a couple different angles to hit it from. And so, like, Jeff Bases talks about if you have a 10% chance at 100 to 1 in return, you should take that bet every time, even though you're going to be wrong nine times out of 10.

The only element that adds an element of reality to that is you should take that bet every time, but most entrepreneurs go in with only enough money to play two hands. And so it's like, do you still take that bet where you actually have only a 20% chance of winning, even if it's 100x return? but you only have two hands worth to play. And I think that's more realistic of like what, you know, his particular situation is. I didn't get to know him well enough to like, I don't know what his team. I don't know if they're able.

I don't know of any of that stuff. But I feel pretty confident that that offer will work. Paul, what's cooking, man? Still going, brother. Still going? Did you have to put your 401k in? Yeah, whole thing. Oh, Jesus.

That's the life, right? All right. So what would you do? Did you run the play? Like what? Walk me through. Walk me through. Run the play.

We got an insane amount of leads. Like so much so that it, it, we didn't have the manpower to deliver what we needed to deliver to close the leads. Better than the alternative problem. I'm only a little bit worried about your sales team's ability. We got 3,700 leads. And we're trying to call these leads. I mean, I got a minuscule sales team, right? And so we ran the play.

Don't get me wrong. And we did. good. We did 325% increase compared to prior year in summer camps. So that's good news. But it could have been so much higher if we had the proper manpower and call sequence and all of the SDRs. The true model, which is we just didn't have it in that time. I mean, I do think that is still your Grand Slam offer. And if you have a 10 to 1 play that you put every dollar you put it in, you get 10 back, you should run that play a whole lot of times. And so I think what we can do is probably just need to get scale up the sales team a little bit. Yes, sir. And you can run the same play

just for birthdays. Birthdays is our wheelhouse. Yeah. And that is always on-go- And you just don't need to spend 20. You can spend two or three to scale it up. Anything else that we talked about that you did? Yeah, got to unspeakable. He gave us permission to start running ads with his videos, which you talked about, and they're converting strong. And we've, we've been seeing that. Like, our, our admissions has doubled in visitation just over the last, you know, four to six weeks. All right. So that is the plan. So giveaways for birthdays, and then you probably need to bring on a couple of salespeople to handle the volume. And I wouldn't be afraid of hiring salespeople, because as long as you have lead flow, salespeople will always make you more than the

price for them. So like I would just don't be afraid of that. That's that's growth spent. Okay. Very low risk. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Beautiful. All right. Do you feel like, do you feel hopeful? I do. The team is stronger than ever. And now with these models starting to kind of find their way, like there's foundation being built that's stronger than it's ever been. And that's a really good thing. Well, good. Well, I love to hear it. And, uh, yeah, I think I'll see you. I'll see you soonish. I can't wait, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate you Paul. All right. Yeah. So it's interesting is like, I think one of the big issues that he was dealing with was cash flow. So cash flow is the constraint. So we had to generate as much cash as possible, which means you knew really strong attraction offer,

which we cracked. Now, what he did here is he took and made a second attraction offer with birthday parties and it worked just as gangbusters as the first, which is honestly insane in a good way. And so he now has two fronted offers that are gangbuster, Napalm offers that just can blow up. So his actual constraint right now, and I'll see what he thinks it is, is sales. Right. So like him getting even more leads on another offer, if he still can't convert them, it doesn't really matter. But if you had the cash flow, he'd be able to hire the people. He'd be able to get his, you know, building up to capacity, you're able to be profitable. And so like right now, that is the absolute clear constraint. Because like cash flow in and of itself is the problem,

but you don't just like, you can't solve cash flow. You have to do the things that create cash flow. And so generating leads and then selling them, which then predates, which proceeds or so it rather comes after making the offer. That's the sequence of what we had to do. We crack the first one. Now it's just actually the blocking attack and like work the lead, sell the leads. That's it. All right. And so that was this episode of Scalar fail, stay tuned for the next one.