The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How an 88 Cent Mistake Led to a $100M Empire. (Playbook with Al Doan) | Ep. #167

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Find my new community at https://www.tkowners.com/I sat down with Al Doan, founder of the Missouri Star Quilt Company, and the guy is just electric. We talked about how he turned his mom’s love of quilting into a massive business that transformed the tiny town of Hamilton, Missouri. What started as a small quilt shop and some YouTube tutorials eventually became a retail empire with 16 quilt stores, restaurants, a hotel, a magazine, and a whole lot more. Al's vision didn’t just grow the business, he's also bought up nearly the entire downtown district to create what he calls a "Disneyland for quilters."Toward the end, we bounce around some really creative business ideas, especially ones you could launch in small towns that most people overlook.You can find Al on Twitter and Instagram as @DrBillNye. Check out his company at missouriquiltco.com and their deals site at quiltersdailydeal.com.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 The Quilting Capital of the World03:00 Building a Quilting Empire05:49 Creating Unique Shopping Experiences09:10 The Power of Content and Community12:00 Navigating Early Challenges14:51 Inflection Points in Business Growth17:47 Owning a Town: The Hamilton Story21:12 The Future of Small Town Businesses25:25 Transforming Small Towns into Destinations32:06 Building Unique Experiences Around Hobbies37:20 Unexpected Successes in Business Ventures40:14 Innovative Home Services Business Ideas45:51 Reimagining Small Town Economies

The quilting capital of the world. We have 16 quilt shops in town, restaurant, hotel stop. We've created a Disneyland for quilters. Everyone ignores those tiny towns. Somebody make the baking version. Somebody make the woodworking version. All of these need somebody to say, this is my spot. If you're into this tube, come here.

There's 10,000 small towns that would all respond to this. Content really was the thing that made it big. So it's $6 per issue and tens of thousands of subscribers. Yeah, dude, it kills it. It's like several million dollars a year. just repurposing my YouTube. You don't have to ask permission. You can just do things. Let's go build cool stuff. So picture this for a minute. You've got a mom that loves quilting. You say to her, mom, this YouTube thing is kind of cool. What if we put up a camera,

filmed you quilting and put it on YouTube? Flash forward 10 years and you own a town in Missouri, all based on that quilting empire that all started with that one YouTube video. That's what happened to Aldone and his family. I met Al at a conference and I loved him immediately. He's got a lot of energy, a lot of good business ideas, and one of the most amazing stories I've ever come across. He owns the Missouri Star Quilt Company, which is supported by 16 different quilt shops in this tiny town of Missouri. He's got Airbnbs, restaurants, hotels, e-commerce side, YouTube channels. If he has a business idea around quilting, he's going to launch it. And so I wanted him to come on and ask him what his story was and what business ideas

he has in any niche. A lot of his ideas center around things you could start in tiny, tiny small towns. Believe it or not, 97% of the U.S. is considered rural. 46 million Americans live in towns of under 25,000 people. And there's a ton of business opportunity in small towns. So we get into that at the end. You're going to love Al. He was on another podcast. It was one of the most popular ever. So I knew I had to have him on mine and he's probably going to come on again. Please share with a friend and enjoy. All right, Al. Tell us who you are. What's up everybody? I'm Al Don of the Missouri Star Quilt Company fame located just north of Kansas City in a beautiful

town of Hamilton, Missouri. Also, I have a very deep resonant voice. So ladies, you're welcome. And I lost my voice as a 40-year-old grown-up singing at an Italian restaurant in Mexico City, which is the best way to lose your voice. So here I am in all of my deep resonant tones. Okay. How many people live in Hamilton, Missouri? Population 1,500. And our claim to fame before this, J.C. Penny, the failed bankrupt retailer,

was born in a farmhouse outside of here. He didn't start his company here. That was in Wyoming. And really didn't care about this place very much. And then the city tore down the train depot in the center of town to move his boyhood home, one room boyhood home. home into the center of town and memorialize this town to him. I think it's done. Wow. But so then comes me, the quilting capital of the world. So what I decided to turn it into. We have 16 quilt shops in town and restaurant and hotel stuff.

Like we've created a Disneyland for quilters. And that's what we've turned Hamilton into now through our work at the Missouri Star. Okay. I already know. I'm going to have so many questions. Let's go. Let's start. 16 quilt shops.

Do you own 100% of all of those? Or what does the structure of those look like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were a small town, right? Nobody was ever, there's never a reason to stop here. It's a little town in the, in the middle of a cornfield, the middle of nowhere. And so we started with one quilt shop and grew that. And the problem we had is nobody cared about this.

Like there's 3,000 quilt shops in America. And like we were 3,001 to zero fanfare. So we launched the web. website, Quiltersdailydeal.com. I was trying to rip off steep and cheap and woup.com. I thought, I thought those models were fun, but aimed at 20-year-olds. And I said, what if I built one of those aimed at my mom? I bet she has money, much more money than I did. And it was true. We built a website, and then the Missouri Star Quilt Company had its own website. And we're doing a great job there, and we had this little quilt shop. Well, we didn't have a warehouse. We're

just shipping the inventory out of our retail location. And as we grew that, The idea was like, oh, well, now we filled this building. We need to open a second building. We can either open a warehouse or we'll open another quilt shop. And so we kept opening quilt shops. And then I have this, I've got like a marketer's brain. And I was like, who has the most quilt shops of any town in the world? In some place in Germany, I think there was like four quilt shops in a town.

And I said, I'm going to murder these ladies. And I opened 10 quilt shops in our town. We just kept going. So we didn't buy theme. It's like the boutique fabrics and the kids fabric and the baby fabric and the novelty fabric, the solids and the florals and the reproductions and the seasonal and the wide fabrics and the modern. You know, there's like all these different themes.

So we built these stores as sort of monuments to this theme of fabric. That physical manifestation of our brand and of our shopping experience is what we try and build the online experience off of. Because selling fabric on the internet is very hard to do. You have to be very thoughtful about, like, people, their desire is to touch it and feel it and, and sort of experience it. And, like, what's the hand? They'll say, what's the feel?

And I can't give them that. So I have to try and give them as much of the experience as I can. So they trust that buying experience. And so now, it's funny. So now we actually do have a couple of shops where, like, we just opened one called the fabric market. And this is, you know, anybody else couldn't have done this shop because it's strictly like a, like a love letter to quilters. And what we did is we went and built a butcher shop and turned it into a fabric store. So you buy your fabric by the pound from behind the counter and they put it on the paper

and wrap it up with a string. And there's a bunch of like novelty stuff and the old like rock candy jars and stuff, all that's filled with buttons and notions and needles and all that stuff. And so you go in and it's like the coolest shopping experience anybody ever imagined around fabric. But again, as a standalone shop, I don't think it would exist anywhere, but as cool shop number 16, where we're just trying to build. Like, you go to Disneyland, dude. My favorite part about Disneyland was when I got into the Star Wars Village and they were doing the droid making and you have all the stuff moving around. And it was just like the coolest shopping experience.

You wanted to do it. It was sort of this great thing that you got when you went there and you got to customize and make your own thing. And I was like, that's what I'm trying to give my mom's demographic. Right. Like everybody will build that for a hot 30 year old like myself or whatever. But who's building it for like our moms? And yeah, they're the biggest consumer like largely they're ignored in the retail space. Quick question. What if there were a private community out there of people that were building businesses based on this podcast? Well, I just made it. And it's only for business starters and business builders. It's called TK owners. And it's basically like having me and a hundred

other business geniuses as your business partner, but you give them zero percent equity. Also, there's going to be exclusive new trends, growth hacks, business ideas, and a database of everything I've ever talked about. You'll find thousands of startup case studies. You'll have weekly Ask Me Anythings with me while I'll answer your questions directly. You'll be in my Slack channel where I'm hanging out every week and helping members one-on-one. We've got exclusive guest speakers, including some names that you'll recognize. And if you're building something cool, I'll introduce you to anyone you need.

TK owners is the fastest way to plug into a smart, ambitious group of builders and accountability partners that are sharing wins without the fluff. And it's $99 bucks a month about the cost of an energy drink per day. You can join now at tkowners.com, link in the show notes. And so diving in and just saying, I'm going to build the coolest experiences I can around retail for these people that are so full of love and so full of excitement and enthusiasm. When you do it, man, they just like the love pours out of these people. They're so glad to be thought of and taken care of.

And so we get to do that in this town of 16 quilt shops. And, you know, the hotel experience is it's a retreat center, sleeps 40 people. And so you come with your girlfriends and stuff and you'll come and rent out a big chunk of it. You all sleep there and make quilts for three days and then go home. But again, like, think about what else is your mom so excited to go and do for a couple of days? Like she's not looking forward to anything, maybe a crew someday, but like, something that's just for her, there's not a lot. And so us building this thing and saying, hey, it's like, it's quilt camp. Come to quilt camp. You're going to go away for a week,

get together with the girls. Every year you do this and come and have a great time, like, do that. And just building those experiences for people, man, we've had a blast doing it. It's been great. So let me say if I got this story, you opened one quilt shop. Yeah. And then you open the daily deal site, right? And that just kind of took off. And I want to get into that one minute. So it really, it really didn't. So the daily deal was funny because I like this was 2009. I've still I went back and looked at the Facebook post like its memories. It showed me my post from 2009. It's like, hey everybody. I made a quilt shop for my mom. Check it out. It's got like two likes, right? And like nobody cares. We put it up online and nobody came. Zero people because you launch a website and nobody knows like

nothing happens. And so we're we're waiting and I'm writing it. Like the woo.com version where they have the weird story and stuff, the whole thing. I was writing these most. bizarre off the wall stories about like, I'd be like, and then I went to Treasure Island and my buddy Pinocchio got turned into a dog and I got swallowed by a whale and I got pooped out and jumbo Rickrack on sale for 395 yards. Like my creative writing skills were just taking us in a much different direction than what my mom would like to read.

We have somebody much better at it doing it now. But like in the beginning, we do this and I do all this work and you put it up at midnight and nobody cared. And so then we got. three weeks in we got one sale for my cousin jennifer she was very sweet and then and then we got like one every now and then we get one or two and then one day dude i fat fingered my price it was the crazy eight's charm pack and it was supposed to be 388 because we bought it for like four dollars and uh it was accidentally 88 cents and uh and we went on and we sold 11 of them and it was like

dude i have a video of me high five like we're jumping and like can't believe and we got eight cents And you lost money. You lost money, but you have 11 sales. It was 11 sales at 88 cents plus $5 in shipping. So my cost on that was $4 plus $2 to ship. And they were paying almost $6 and most of the people bought another thing. And I was like, whoa, lost leader. Like I stumbled upon a lost leader and discovered what that meant.

It was like, this works. And so that changed the whole dynamic of our business. We got the 11 from there. And then the other thing that we started doing is I started, like YouTube was only a year and a half old at that point. at that point. You know, YouTube started in 2006, and like 2008, we started this quilt shop. And so I started recording videos on a Canon digital elf, right? I'm like manually zoom, right? Like I'm holding, I'm like, the early ones, you can hear me whispering like, mom, I can see, you know, like doing that kind of stuff. Zoom by bending your elbow. That's right, that's right.

And I was editing on Windows Movie Maker while I was out consulting, you know, I'd fly to Pittsburgh and consultant. Then at night in the hotel room, I'm editing quilting videos. And didn't understand the algorithm or anything at that point. We'd just upload like five of them in a day. And then a ton of people would come to the site. And then it would all die down. We're like, all right.

So then we started posting them once a week. They'd go out on Fridays and we'd get a big surge in traffic. That started growing our list. And we grew a newsletter and an audience around that. And the newsletter, not even joking. We had like 60, almost 70% open rates on our newsletter. because we'd send it once a week, it was super high quality. And it always led with the content that was free and a big value to our quilters.

And again, remember, nobody was making cool content for these people. And so I was one of the very early ones saying, I don't care about video games or, you know, hot 20 year olds traveling to Miami. I just want to talk to you. And we made this great content forum and spoke to them as humans. And it worked out great. They loved us. So would the Daily Deal site even have been possible without your YouTube channel?

It went without the YouTube channel for a little bit. It wouldn't have, I mean, it wouldn't been anything, though. In the beginning, dude, 2009, when you launched a website, literally what we did is we, I was replying to blog posts and comments and replying to comments on discuss and like Live Nation, I think was a comment engine. I was just like, oh, that's so cool. I saw this other great blog over here. Yeah, yeah.

You know, like that. And people would ban you and you'd get shut down. Like you do eight of them and they just, they know you're spamming. And we went on like Kijiji and Craig's List and tried to like respond to stuff there. Oh, that's so cool. Have you thought about listening? You know, like trying to do that and again, you're just getting, you're just getting blocked. And like, dude, my marketing brain back then, I was like, I don't know how to get this in front of a bunch of people.

We're in the Yahoo directory. And what else? You know, like where else do you go? And social media wasn't really a thing. You just had your wall that you'd post on. I don't even think the friend feed was up. yet for the news feed maybe it probably was but like but like it wasn't get like we couldn't just talk about the business anywhere realistically and so the the youtube channel ended up being the only marketable

thing that we really had because otherwise we're just on sale today and and in quilting we don't have enough skews to on sale today a ton of stuff now we do that because we're big but like at the time man you only you didn't even have 30 products like to put one on a deep discount every day would have build us. Yeah, we had to be real creative with it. And the content really was what became the thing that made it big. So I guess yes, it wouldn't have existed, but also like it definitely did exist without it. It just wasn't anything interesting. And this was also during the early days of Groupon and living social too. So like the consumers were starting to behave in a way that really benefited this site, right? Yeah. It was funny now because I feel like, I feel like the deal

sides have sort of fallen out of favor. Right. It's still a big leader for us because it's such a of our brand and things, but like, but like I noticed for myself, I don't care what's on sale at if I don't, if I'm not shopping for a set of kitchen wear, I don't care that one's half off. You know, like I'm not driven by that anymore where the earlier days of the internet, the novelty was just the fact that something would be on sale for so much. How could this even exist? Um, was so exciting. But I feel like a lot of that has shifted now.

If I understand it correctly, you opened the first quilt shop and then you started growing and you really needed more warehouse space. quote warehouse space, but because of the fact that you're in small town, the price per square foot of a retail spot versus a warehouse spot is kind of about the same. So if we're going to fulfill online orders, why not do it in a retail spot? Is that kind of what you were thinking? Yeah. Well, that, that yes, there were no warehouses to buy so I could only buy these other retail buildings. But also, I thought I invented this. And I don't think I did. But the retail warehouse, right? We're like, because they're fulfilling from stores, it didn't matter that I was out in the middle

in nowhere. What I didn't want was for customers to drive all the way out, get here, and walk into my beautiful store and have nobody be here in very low energy and some lady doing a crosswork, right? Like, that wasn't the experience I was trying to give. And so what I was trying to get out of them is like, let's be fulfilling over. So they're cutting and they're moving. I got 12 employees all buzzing around. Activity. And you open the door in this tiny town. You say, what is this? You guys are crushing it. Yeah, you're doing something. And this is great. I'm immediately energized by what you're. you're doing. And so that was, that was, that was a lot of the intent was, was, I was manufacturing the energy, right? Yeah. And trying to, trying to create that momentum that, uh, it was kind of

hard to do. I've heard of restaurants doing this, like restaurants that are slow. They'll go rent, like supercars and park them out front or they'll like, they'll do something to generate people outside the front door or inside. And it's all kind of manufactured, but it, it, it sends a signal that, hey, this place is cool. This place is interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You were doing that before. It was cool. 100%, man. Okay.

So what were the big inflection points along the way? Like zero to one stores, one to multiple. When did you really feel like we kind of own this town? The big moments happened, one when we built our warehouse. I think that was a big one for me. We had to do an SBA loan and the whole thing. It was like not easy to do. We had to work really hard at it in order to get that to pull off.

It was a disaster, an absolute disaster, but like we mainly because like I tried to do a lot of the stuff myself. I don't know if you've ever run into any of that. I was like, Palat rack. You're going to charge me $10,000 to pallet rag? That's bull crap, dude. I can do that myself. And it turns out it's actually like, I don't know, that's pretty, pretty good value to

get the pallet racking done. And then I was like, oh, I need to run computers and stuff. this disaster, dude, I can't run a network for 100 computers and like pull all my own cable. Like, I screwed a bunch of that up. So it wasn't easy. But when we launched that, that's when I was like, I was like, dude, there's something magic here. Like, I'm doing a really good job. And we moved out of our existing stuff, moved out there.

And like, I had real warehouse employees. That was a big deal for us. The other part was we bought our old hardware store. And our old hardware store was sort of a beacon and tech. But it was one of those that like the guy wanted to sell it. He didn't want to be there anymore, which is fine. And, and sorry, I've actually, you'll have to edit this out. I'm buying my wife's birthday present as we're doing this.

I'm so sorry. Now that I know you're buying your wife's birthday present, I'm not editing it out because that's hilarious. I'm like, I'm trying to check out. They're asking so many questions. So my wife loves this girl on Instagram, Brioni, what's her name, Brioni machine? She's over in the UK and, uh, dude, she's rad. And so she does these, uh, these workshops on like mosaic stuff.

Right. Yeah. I'm looking at it now. It's, it's cool. And I, dude, all my, I've DM'd her like 10 times. I'm like, please let me distribute your stuff in the States. Your stuff's amazing. I think you're awesome. Let me do your stuff.

And she's not, she's just this little shop and most of her stuff is in like workshops and stuff. And so, uh, so this is my big surprise. Dude, I, I spend all year just trying to find like something. I think my wife might jam on. And then like, I'm getting this. I'm going to send her over to London to do this thing. We've got Mother's Day on Sunday.

I don't have anything yet. Oh, dude, here's my move for that. So every year I buy my kids buy, they don't buy this. I buy them a, like matching suits. Last year was a chef costume. You know, I like it. So we'll do suits this year or something. Then they'll make breakfast and bed.

And it's, dude, they're cute. They're six and four. These kids rolling in there. mom's going to love it. It's going to be great. That's my hack for Mother's Day. It's just a dress up and a little breakfast in bed and we're golden. Okay. Okay, sorry.

Sorry, so I got distracted. But the big inflection points, we bought this hardware store and turned that into like, it was JCPenney's 500 store. And so like town loved it. We were able to restore a bunch where you get some old penny memorabilia put in there and then made it into a thing. And with that, we ended up owning an entire city block in addition to our main couple stores. I was like, oh, cool. And then we built, uh, the first building or the second building that we

bought had a big vacant lot next to it. We ended up turning that into, I was watching a bunch of like pedestrian flow TED talks on YouTube. And I was like, we just have a big Broadway. It's like one big straight road. And I would kill for one of those cool like courthouse towns that has the square around. And it's so, so easy to build the center of town around that. But like, we had this big, just strip. And so like I had to build a square for people to gather. And so I set it back like 50 feet from the road and put a little plaza there and let people. So now they know where to park when they come to town. They see that it's the center.

We do the restaurants there. And so like once I started building sidewalks and put it in my own life posts and grab like, I was like, all right, we've done a thing. This is a big moment. The other one that was a big one for us, man, was like probably 20 million a year. I've actually, I've got this chart I can share with you that my HR guy gave me, or a buddy of mine that consulted and worked with us for a little bit. But there's like deliberate reflection points where it's like one to 10 employees, then you have to recreate all the processes.

Then at 28 employees, everything breaks. You have to recreate the processes. 75 employees, 120, you know, like as it keeps going, whether you're a service industry or a software business, they each have very predictable moments of both revenue and employee accounts where everything breaks. It's funny, man, because like it's hard to be on top of that because, like for me, I built this warehouse picking solution. And we're great for when me and Christy were in there picking away. And then all of a sudden you have 20 people using the same dumb process that I built. And like to raise your hand and say this process is broken, I am going to declare it broken and going to recreate it and think through, what's the right way to do this for 20 people?

Well, you can do that. Anybody can do that. But it takes a lot of sort of intellectual honesty to break things that aren't broken, especially when you're running at breakneck speed, trying to just get the new things out. And so to go look back at your process. be like, this isn't serving us anymore. I've got to fix this.

It's really exhausting and very hard talent to build, but it was one that we've had to get good at because then you end up growing so fast and you move at those inflection points. If you don't voluntarily crack that bone and refuse it, it's going to come back to get you. So those are the other ones. What percentage of Hamilton do you own today, whether buildings or businesses or?

But I say I own it. I own the downtown district. In our downtown district, of the retail shops. I own all but two stores. And so, so there's probably 20-ish buildings and we have like 18 of them, maybe a little more. And then we have the theater, we have an old library that we turned into us too. Like you got all, we have all the things around. But yeah, when you when you drive through town, most of it is us and most of that stuff man, these small towns, our buildings

always swapped hands for like 20 grand. So there's an old almost gonna fall down, you buy it for 20 grand. You have to put a hundred grand into the brick. so that it'll stand for another hundred years and like like tuck point all that stuff and get everything standing straight and then you got to like fix the inside which we just did like a shell so a big drywall shell with new electrical and water and plumbing and all the stuff and then you've got a retail shop that's going to stand for another hundred years whether my company goes out of business or not this this town is better off for it which i love we're in each one probably close like to 300 grand right but like in whatever small town you're in it doesn't like it's funny man some of these places if

you're an hour away from an airport not in like a national park it's cheap and it's super cheap nobody quite knows what to do with it the town's lost its identity it doesn't really know what to do with itself and like does anybody want to start a business on main street we had we had a casey's gas station and a subway sandwich shop that was it and nobody else like there wasn't a reason for anybody else to start a business here because nobody was walking up and down main street so why would they and so when you're creating that from nothing I love like every e-commerce brand i think should have as an homage to its community, like start a little shop, put a thing in, and then put your office in the back

or something, right? But like, put a representation, some physical manifestation of your brand on Main Street, so you're contributing something and giving a little tax revenue or something to the area. Like, I think that's kind of important. I'm a big advocate of that. So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell just like that. Thank you. Do you have any numbers on like annual visitors to Hamilton and how that's increased? Like 150, just less than 150,000.

Wow. Because I mean, because we were on a Shopify store, we know, we know the zip codes of everybody that comes through and places of purchase. You get really good data. And it's a bunch, man. What's crazy though, is like Joe, or not Joans, Waco, Magnollia down in Waco. She's doing like 60,000 a week. Like she's moving on an audience. 60,000 people. A week, yeah. They move a ton of people through there. Again, I actually have not looked at that.

No, that was told to me. So I'm guessing. Guys, I may be wrong. But it's a number that I aspire to, right? I'm like, great, we can do it. But, I mean, they've got such a density of people with, you know, an hour from Dallas and in Waco with a bunch of, you know, like right near Austin. It's easy to build the destination to that.

But it's actually not a very interesting visit. It's a shop, a bakery, and then they have a restaurant a couple miles away. And so like you park and go there. It's cool. It built a cool experience. You walk through the food trucks and then go into the big store, but that's it, right? It was just a line. Everything was just a line.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, you think about like, dude, if I could turn my little town into something great, do I deserve 10,000 people a week to come through here? Is the bakery incredible? Is the steakhouse awesome? Can I give a little bit of something else, a little personality of this town? Dude, I say all the time. Like when you're a hammer, everything's nail.

My hammer is for sure. You should build a town. dude. I wish Nintendo had a town. I'm a huge fan of Overwatch. I play Overwatch on the Xbox a bunch. Because I'm a child. I play it at night, you know, before I go to bed. My wife reads and I play and then we go to sleep.

I'm not a bad husband. It's all right. Sure. But, uh, yeah, you know. But, but like if, we'll edit that out. If that's my, if that's my thing, why can't I go to their big physical experience and do the stuff and dress up? Yeah, you would.

Like you're such a fan. You would pay the thing. And I'll go. I'll go spend a couple bucks and I'll eat at the dumb cafe with a cookie that's shaped like my favorite player and like you spend the things and you do it. Yeah. Right. Lord of the Rings is funny because they have the trail.

They have little stuff down in New Zealand. But like still, man, some town could just be like, we are Lord of the Ringsville. And they would capture all of that. And any town could just raise their hand and be that. Yeah. Right. That's right. Well, what's funny because like my wife got into beekeeping two years ago.

And I'm like, I immediately go, where in America? There should be some town in Indiana that I send you to for two weeks. And you're going to be an expert when you come home. You have all the gear. You try it on all the things. We have twins. Dude, you should be able to go to Lehigh, Utah, to the twins capital of the world and race baby strollers and try out all 10 car seats. And you're going to spend $5,000 there because you're there with an intent to buy.

Or you should be able to go to Wisconsin because you're into cheese making and go to that county. And each town, one town is blue cheese and one town is good. but like there's this identity that's given to these areas and it doesn't have to be the entire town but you need a district that is this thing you say we embrace this identity all you freaky freaks fly your freak flag here and because what you're creating is you're creating a comic conic on for that space where we're like even quilting dude they're hoarders at home they come here and they're connoisseurs and collectors and people appreciate that they're artists and quilters and then they got to go home and they're horticians and they got to go home and they're home to their kids who don't understand what they do and just tell them that they got a basement full of fabric. But here they have an identity that's understood and appreciated. You're doing that with, you know, somebody make the baking version. Somebody make the woodworking version. Somebody make that, like all of these need somebody to say, this is my spot. If you're into this too, come here. Like, dude, there's a guy that he sells fish tanks that I was talking to a year ago. He's like,

oh, we do a bunch of fish and it's a mail order. It's pretty complicated. We do a bunch of And I was like, bro, fish town. Like, dude, have you talked to anybody that runs like a seawater aquarium? They nerd out. They're growing their coral and they got their fishes, their whole thing. And if you can walk into a store front, it's 2,800 square feet, and it's just coral. And then one that's just whatever fish, and one that's just the worms and the eels. And one that's just, like, give a little identity to this stuff.

Your intent to buy is going to be through the roof. And as soon as that's your hobby, you love it. And you've got to hedge that with your online sales. because you probably can't justify that expense at the beginning. But, dude, I'm telling you, I'm a couple billion media impressions in on my story being told by media just saying, wait, you did what? You built a quilt town? Hold on.

Let me put you on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Let me put you on CBS Sunday morning. Let me put you on NBC Nightly News. Let me put you on NPR and 4. It's just begging for a story. Dude, they love to tell it because I did something new and different and weird. And they've never told the story of fishing around. And they never told the story of Cheatown.

And they need stuff to write about. So, okay, my mind is like going crazy right now. I love what I find my fellow like small business nerds, dudes. I'm just like, we can just riff for days. Yes. How many visitors was Hamilton getting 20 years ago before any of this existed? There was not a visitor. There wasn't a reason to stop.

Of the 150,000 a year, that's like 98%. That's right. Missouri Star. Yeah. Anybody else was stopping at the gas station and get a slice of pizza and some fuel. That was it. Do you have any data on like how many dollars you capture on average, like across all of your entities from each visitor?

I have like like visitors to my that spend with me, I know. Is that what you're asking? You're talking like economic impact? They go to the restaurant, then they go to shop. Oh, no. So I don't have, I don't have the economic impact for the area. But it's funny, man, because when you try and do anything, that's like the economic impact to something that's a very real number

that people should care about. You go to a small town like us with a mayor and four aldermen and you talk about economic impact and they have no idea what you mean. But it's actually affecting their lives more than any other town too, right? Our town did I have such a distaste

working with the government in our town because their position is they don't like because we are successful. They don't want to do anything that might risk us being more successful. So any investment I try and making the town. That's backwards. They refuse. I know. They should worship you. You'd think, like, if I get called out the town, let me call up the biggest business guy and say, hey, how can we

work together? To get a parking. How can we work together? Like, here's the things that the community wants. Do you want any of these also? Let's work together. These small towns do they don't have that. It's just a fear and like, and sort of a backwards thinking. I mean, they've never done business. Most of them are like employed bus drivers or jobless bozos. And it's just frustrating. It's frustrating. It's a frustrating political environment to work in for me out here. But like whatever I buy, I just get to do what I want with and go build great experiences

in spite of the people that don't want you to do it. You don't have to ask permission. You can just do things. Just go build cool stuff. You can. I have a T-shirt that says you can just do things. So it's true. Where would someone start?

Like if they wanted to start, let's say they were, they have nothing. They just have an extreme interest like sourdough bread making. And they want to make a sourdough bread town. Like what's step one? So I got into this with a guy who wanted to build a creator town outside of Austin. And I was like, I don't think it'll work. I think, well, and actually there's this great town out in Kansas. Humboldt Kansas.

Have you ever got a chance to go through? It's the town company is they make all the trailer hitches sold in America or something. Right. Like it's, they've got a great business. And they built an incredible town, they have a beautiful gym. They bought all the downtown and fixed them all up and they have a French candy store. And they have a cool bar and a hipster coffee shop and all this stuff. The idea is we'll build this and we think people will come visit.

And they didn't. They built it and kind of nobody cares. It's just a nice town in the middle of nowhere that nobody goes to. And so for us, we built an audience, right? And we built a community and a company and pull people to it. So if you were going to build a sourdough, a sourdough bread town, I think you need to be a sourdough bread company first. Or partner with one. Or partner with one.

And bring a hand and say, we're going to do this for you, right? Like, you know, go find your local dairy. And you could build some amazing dairy experiences. Like, here's the milk store and the cheese store and the milkshake store and the ice cream store. And they all source to each other. But like we created an experience in what could have been a cute little gift shop. we created an experience. You need to have the company not depend on the success of that retail shop in the beginning. And then you you need some like spaces that are undervalued and nobody cares

about. So go buy your one, but plan on buying like you're two or three and enough that you have like what you want is you want to put on a billboard the sourdough capital of the Mountain West. The sourdough capital of, you know, the mid, like whatever. It's enough that you get to own the tagline. Because nobody's got three sourdough stores in a town. That's crazy. Yeah. And so now you do. And you've got the one that's all the starters.

And you've got the one that's all the cutting boards and the knives and the special things. And like, and like presents and all that stuff. And then your last one is going to be your finished products. And you're going to buy it. It's a bakery. It's the San Francisco style bakery. It's going to have all the stuff in it. And it's a delicious coffee shop.

And you have a little baked treats, but mainly it's the bread that comes out of there. You kill it. Now you got that three. And if you're driving along the highway and you see the billboard for the sourdough capital of the whatever, we turn off and go there. Absolutely. What did it cost you to get that? Well, it was $20,000 a building plus whatever you put into fixing them up that you've now financed over 30 years. Your monthly cost is $2,500, $3,000.

Right? It's nothing. And then you have your retail experience that you build your product in there. And one, maybe one employee per or one employee and cut holes in the wall and run it like a fair way at a, out of six flags and that one person is going to move between if the if the traffic is slow but like now you own the sourdough capital of the world and that's that makes it onto the website and that makes it into the and and the content that you get as you're telling that story to your audience we bought these shops oh we're gutting them me and the me and the team are in here pulling this out i'm thinking

about this here's some sketches i'm going to share about it's a flyway it grows and you're producing this content that everybody loves and your audience continues to grow and then because you took your audience with you, they want to come see the finished product. They just got to come and check it out. And they want to give you a hug because you did this amazing thing. And you don't need 10 to start. You need like, you need three. You need enough that it's interesting. Two shops is fine, but like, get three buildings and give me three experiences in each and like put the billboard up and say, come check this out. That's worth it, dude. We'll pull off the road for the best cinnamon roll in the world. Absolutely. We'll pull off the world for sourdough capital of the world if that's

your jam. You could teach classes like artists. style baking. Then again, your wife's getting, you're getting into sourdough, like, and you're making bread that's doing a cool thing. Great. Well, we offer a sour go class on how to cut the designs in. You're going to practice on. Ten lobes of sourdough in a day.

We're going to teach you the thing. Give you the stents. You're going to do that. And fill that up a couple times a week. I went to a cooking class down in Kansas City. My wife got me one for Christmas, which was awesome. And it's a, it's a kitchen store that does cooking classes in the back. And what they do is you pay to go there.

And pretty much you hire a chef. comes and makes you the meal, but he demos it as he doesn't. So you're not actually cooking, but like, oh, and you're doing this. Oh, wow. And he's like, it's just an interactive experience. But it's a dinner. It got me in their store. Everybody there spent 100 bucks on cookbooks and whatever else. And we sat and made a good meal. And that was it. But like they sold out the tickets. They all sell out because they do one a week. And it's killer. So if you're the sourdough place, right? Like do the sourdough, like have the experience and you can come there, like come and stay for a week in our town and sign up for the five packet classes.

You're going to be there every night. You're going to come out of here. You're just going to love Sourdone. It's going to be amazing. It's going to do a cool thing. And then you go and get your local there to come and take the other side of the street. And now you, this abandoned town that nobody cared about, well, now you have a real thing. And there's a reason to stop there.

There's a reason to live there. You want to walk up and down the street when you get there. And like, it's a big win. And you've saved your little town. Of all these businesses that you've started and opened in Hamilton, what have been like unexpected cash cows. Like maybe not a standalone business, but like a product line or something where you thought it would do okay and it just really took off. One we did, man. So like we had a big audience that we were like that we were showing these tutorials to. And so we do these weekly

tutorials. We don't make any money off of those specifically, but it's building our audience. They have an affinity to Missouri Star. And one thing that we did that was great was we started repurposing the tutorials. We take the last 10 tutorials and put them in the magazine. And so we started a magazine, put the last sentence tutorials in there, and then shipped that every other month to people. And we needed like 10,000 subscribers to break even. We got that in the first like five hours. Like it was just just like, oh, we've got 10,000 subscribers, cool. We got 50,000 subscribers cool. And what were you charging? So we were charging like six bucks because to print a magazine costs like 80 cents. And I was like, geez, the margins on this are

great. And where most of those businesses break down is they have ad sales teams and all that stuff. I was like, I don't want to put any ads to this. This is just going to be my product. It's going to be my tutorials. And I'm going to editorialize this. So it took me a staff of three people. They make it. They print it. And it goes out to this big distribution list. And now I think it's like seven or eight bucks per. But it's a great magazine. And it's just repurposing our existing content. But that was one that I'm like, I'm like, holy crap. There's there's demand for this. People love reading it. It's sort of a like we get to tell our. Our story in there is when we got we have a bunch of products.

We have like a broad range of skews like 30,000 skews in our store sort of thing. And so you do a tutorial and that can show one line of fabric that's like 20 skews. And then you do four of those a week. Maybe we do another set of tutorials. That's eight in a month that you get out. Then you're going to send some emails. So there's still a problem with like getting to show enough product. And so then the magazine comes out.

That's another 10 collections times 20 products that get to be shown and put in the front of people's mind. Because the problem with any of these larger businesses is like, did people see the new stuff that we brought in? Did we do a good job of surfacing that? And that's, that's always challenged. So we built this magazine, helped with that, made some good money for us. There's a great job. I'm flying our message and lets people subscribe and be, uh, be loyal customers to us. That was a surprising one that like, I didn't think there was a much as much demand for that as there was. So it's $6 per issue, one issue per month? What? Every other month. We do it every other month. Yeah.

Tens of thousands of subscribers. Yeah, dude, it kills it. It's like several million dollars a year, just repurposing my YouTube store. You make a magazine. No, you're a magazine probably more free. I'm thinking about it right now. I'm thinking about a lot of things right now. It's just a still from your short and then like what you said.

I just got to flip through it on the toilet. Are you sick of everything at your phone? We'll save some hours on there and read my, read my TikToks. Well, like people are paying you to be sold to in a different way too. You're just selling more profits through it. Absolutely. You answered that better than I could have ever imagined. Yeah.

You know, it's what I do. Chris, thank you. I was sitting right here in my office two hours ago talking to my cousin slash business partner. And we've been talking about like this home services business idea where think Groupon plus Costco plus home services. It's Costco in that a homeowner could pay $20 a year, $20 a year to be on like a deals list, right? Okay. And then, so that's what makes it like Costco. You pay 20 bucks a year. Therefore, every time a deal comes up, you feel like you need to buy it because you're paying for it. You're paying a yearly membership. And then let's say you launch in a neighborhood,

you partner with a pressure washer. That pressure washer says, if I'm going to do a driveway in the neighborhood, it's 350 bucks because I got to drive there, drive back. But if I do 10 homes in that neighborhood. It's 250 bucks because I can have economies of scale. So then you as the middleman come in to all the people on your list that have opted in 20 bucks a year and say, hey, this week only. Let me give you my idea and then we can merge it to, right? So did you know you're supposed to reseal your grout every seven years? So video is cool, but you know what's better? Longform audio via podcast and my newsletter. TKOPPod.com. Go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast three episodes a

week, stuff like this. You're going to love it. All free. No sleazy sales bitch. TKOPOD. Okay. According to the big grout resellers. Did you know you're supposed to drain your water heater every year? Did you know? Every year. Like, oh, you're saying you play into that fear. There's so much. Your fridge is supposed to get a cleaning once every two years and your dishwasher is supposed to get a filter replace in your washing machine has parts that are supposed to be updated. And the truth is none of us do any of that. There's no update that happens.

And I think that there's a great model of like a dude and a truck that again goes and sells into a neighbor and says, I'll do all of it for you. You're going to sign up. You're going to pay 200 bucks a month, 500 bucks a month, whatever it is. And I'm going to come one day a quarter. And you can even do the stuff where like, did your light bulb go out? Well, shoot me a text. And my great Philippine assistant is going to be my dispatcher.

And she's going to say, is this urgent because we can come and fix it right now? or it can go on your list of stuff to get fixed when we get there. And then it's just part of the fee. And so you charge a little up charge if you got to come out right away or you do the one day. And like the one guy with the truck, you could put, let's say you're doing one a day, but you need like 20 days free and you're 90 days in a quarter, right?

You're doing 60, 70 homes. Call it probably less than 60 homes, right? And your 60 homes at $1,000 or 500 bucks a month or whatever your fee, 200 bucks a month, whatever it ends up being. But they're paying for the one day that you're going to come there and do that quarterly maintenance that needs to happen. I love that because I think there's a lot of people that know they should. The idea of having a maintenance person for your home, your wife can text.

The garage door opener is broken. You say, I don't know how to, like, I'm just, go call a garage guy. And the fact that now you have a bunch of approved subs you do. The other thing, as you were telling your idea, like what have you charged more? You charged like 200 bucks a month. But in exchange for that, you get the deal version of all your filters delivered and take care of. And the deal version of all, like, all the normal maintenance stuff that you sign up for, you're going to go and negotiate your economies of scale on a large scale for, like,

toilet paper, all the home good stuff that's going to be normal. And then you have this, like, exclusive price that you have access to and all that gets delivered to your door. Once a month, you come through and just make your deliveries, right? Like, there's some version of that. Honestly, all three of those are probably great ideas that I would love. love to see somebody out there doing. They'd be killer. Agreed. Yeah, I just, I just think it'd be interesting because we probably all need our driveway pressure wash, but we're not going to do it. But if someone said, hey, 150 bucks off today, you're already paying for this. You're paying for

the right to have this discount. I'd say, sure. Well, especially if you build a cadence where like the guy comes through once every three months or twice a year, he comes through. Then every time, because you do the same with like the car cleaner guy. There's the folks that come and gas up your vehicles at home, right? Like, like, have you got me a deal on that? And he's coming through once a week. And it's like, oh, sure. Yeah, top it up. That's great. I love going to go and negotiating with those guys on behalf of your neighborhood to do a thing. I think that's clever. I firmly think that like neighborhoods are sort of an underappreciated asset class. Thousand percent of like, of like, dude, little bodegas should exist in like, you know, small Phoenix subdivisions. And like,

They should have a little, like they should have their own little personality in a gathering place and a spot and a coffee shop amongst 300 homes out there that everybody can go to that's not going into the city. You know, like, that's interesting. I think there's room for all that stuff to start to be a thing again. And somebody that's like going and representing those neighborhoods to get deals and get people to come out and give services, I think it's super clever. Agreed. We got to save that bodega idea because I want to dedicate a whole. That's a good one. I do not.

I've got, I've actually drawn out the blueprint for this. Okay. I want to do it. I think about this stuff all the time in like 300 person towns. I'm from a 1,500 person town in the middle of nowhere, right? If rebar is the thing that disrupts the steel industry to, you know, shoot at Clayton Christensen. And, you know, I keep thinking about what's going to disrupt Dollar General. You know, how do I create an experience that doesn't even need an employee at all that I can go and drop in a 300 person town in the middle of nowhere that that's, you know, nothing.

but like they want to be able to gather in a spot. They want to be able to go and buy diapers if they need to in an emergency. How do I give that bodega type experience to a small town? If you can crack the nut on that, there's 10,000 small towns from Wisconsin down to Alabama tomorrow that would all respond to this. I love it. Yeah, because Dollar General won't touch a town under 3,000. I've seen them in towns like 1,000.

And we have 1,500 there in our town, right? So they have a small footprint concept that they do. But like, they're still construction. strained. I would love to put one in. I've got this little village township thing that's not even really a town. It's got a school and a little bit of other stuff. But then it's like a farm community. And I'm like, you could never afford to have somebody standing there all day waiting for someone coming and get a sale. Yeah. So if I could, if I could build the version of it, I think that's why I reached out to you the last time. I was like, there's a vending concept in here somehow that like gives me

a shopping experience and lets a town be proud of what they got. It's funny in my in my warehouse, right? I've got a I've got one of those like grabbing go snack things. And so it's just all open. It's not a vending machine. You just grab your stuff, go to the thing. And it tells you how much to pay. Swipe your card and go. And I'm like, I kind of want one of those, but you have to key fob it.

You know, I want to know who's coming in and opening the door. But then like go shop like a normal human and don't, don't put it all beyond glass. There's something like that that I think starts to be meaningful. Agreed. I really like that idea. I got moves. We got moves. Everyone ignores those tiny towns,

especially if they haven't lived up near one or if it's not on their radar. I've thought about this with like hotels, right? Real estate stuff. Because to build a 100 person hotel or a 100 person apartment complex, multifamily, like that's right around when you start getting some of the economies of scale. You're making skies. Didn't care of enough. And that's attractive to some big real estate organization to roll up.

They want to grab a couple of those. My town has like a 10-person multi-family apartment complex, right? It couldn't support 100-person one. But I have nine towns around me that are all this same small size. And I wonder if like kind of 500 person town support a 10 unit department complex. And then if you do 10 of those, now you've got your 100 unit department complex. You still have the economies of scale because you need one property manager to go to each of those. It's within an hour driving.

And now through much more creative financing and all that stuff, you've now created a 100 unit department complex. He probably couldn't have gone and got financing to do originally. But you could do them 10 units at the time at a million dollars. instead of, you know, the 100 unit one at $10 million. It's much more tenable. And you do a couple of those. All of a sudden, you've got a couple hundred units you can roll up and it's going to be attracted to a Starwood Real Estate Group or something, right?

Like you can go move that around an interesting way where before you made that asset class, no one's going to touch it. I mean, my friend Kyler's doing this. He bought a six-unit RV park in Miten, Utah. And it is 100% full. Everyone pays on time. And he's just, he's starting to buy those up in all kinds of little towns. and everyone pays online.

He doesn't even need anyone to stop by. So that's something there. He doesn't care what you do. I mean, you automate some of that stuff and put it on a normal cycle if somebody's going to go and put hands on it, and make sure it's real, right? Yeah, like, as long as that exists,

there's even, I was playing with like an Airbnb concept to something like this. Like, you go to any tiny town, there's a couple people that are trying to go there to visit mom or they're passing through or something. And if you could create sort of the, it's on air, Airbnb, but also we're built to book tonight.

You know, there's some like, like, this is, this is the rebar of hotels of like, yeah, right, we've got five, we got five Airbnbs. And then if they're not renting out, you long term amount for 700 bucks a month. There's always some kid coming out of high school that would love to not live at mom's house. And you just out, you're doing a few of these. I'm like, there's some model here where you tiny home your way into an entire nationwide, uh, Airbnb network or something, right? Like I would love traveling with kids, man.

I hate standing at a Hilton now. Alone, I love it. But when you've got kids, you need two bedrooms, like, those things just don't work. And if you gave me, like, I know 30 minutes outside of any major city, they're sitting one of these, like, owls, you know, Airbnb things. And I can go and grab one of those, and I know that it's clean. I know that it's there. But, like, somebody's just, they're expecting it to rent out once a week.

They're not trying to get it to rent out nightly. And I'm going to come and flip the sheets of all of them one time in a week. You know, I think your labor distributes enough. that you can actually pull something like that off. That's interesting to me. Well, I think we're both out of time. Dude, let's do this again, man. This is great.

I want to have you on again. This is amazing. People are going to love you. Where can we find you if anyone has any questions? I'm Dr. Bill Nye on all the socials. Obviously. We all picked our moniker when we were 14 playing Unreal Tournament. Didn't we?

That's what we all did. I mean, my aim screen name was Wow, I Like Waffles, all caps. See, and if you would have gotten rich sooner, you would have never had to let that go. My problem was success came too early. I never had to grow up and get a real email. My main weakness is I got rich too young, you know. I'm too caring.

I'm too early and I got rich. I volunteer way too much. Yeah. You know what it is. Okay, let me know in the comments if you want me to have Al on the podcast again because he has way more stories and business ideas than we'll ever have time for.