The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Making Millions Teaching 50k Kids How To Use Heavy Machinery. Ep. #031

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Ever wondered what it's like to start a theme park where kids can operate real construction machinery? Today,  I sit down  with Jacob, the founder of Dig World, a place where kids, and adults too, do exactly that. We cover everything from the park's development, startup costs, and insurance challenges to the innovative ways he has brought Dig World to life.Timestamps further down. Enjoy!---Ask me a question on or off the show here: http://form.typeform.com/to/Eb8KaY0pLearn more about me: http://chrisjkoerner.comLearn about my company: http://cofounders.comFollow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/mhp_guyFree weekly business ideas newsletter: https://newsletter.chrisjkoerner.com/---00:52 Meet Jacob: The Entrepreneur Behind Dig World03:56 The Birth of Dig World: A Personal Story06:09 Challenges and Triumphs in Launching Dig World09:50 Operational Insights and Business Model18:46 Partnerships and Community Engagement24:15 Insurance Challenges for Unique Businesses26:10 Customer Perceptions and Pricing Strategies28:25 Business Venture37:42 Field Trips and Educational Partnerships43:35 Marketing Strategies and Influencer Impact46:34 Future Plans and Franchise Opportunities47:34 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

To me, that's the brilliance in all of this, is that you're in a mall parking lot. Like, you've got baked in traffic on day one. I just think that I can't get over that. That's brilliant. Welcome to the corner office. So every now and then, I tweet about a business that just seems really freaking interesting to me. And this business was Digworld, which is basically a theme park for kids to come and

operate excavators and other heavy machinery. And I knew nothing about this business. This business didn't pay me to appear on this podcast or anything. I just wanted to learn. And I thought, why not hit record right before I learn about a cool and interesting business? So I interviewed Jacob today. Jacob answered every single question I threw at him regarding numbers, revenue, how many customers, what are their revenue lines, how much does insurance cost?

Everything. I think you're going to love it. It's super interesting. It's a great guy. Enjoy. Jacob, great to meet you. I have no intent here other than just to learn about your business as if we cross paths at a dinner party and someone sat us next to each other and we were just talking business because business is

all I know. It's all I love. It's like if you put me at a dinner party next to someone with the W-2, I'm just going to eat my chicken and that's it. So I just want to learn. Love it. Love it, man. It's an honor to be here.

Thank you for getting this set up. And I love talking about business as well. I love talking about Digworld. So thank you for letting me be able to do that. Yeah, absolutely. So why don't you first start by just talking about, your background pre-dig world. Like what happened in your life

that got your brain to the point where you're like, I should start dig world. Yeah, that's a great question. So I was born and raised all over the southeast. I went to Texas A&M University. That's where I met my wife. We have a very traditional Aggie story.

We dated all the way through college and moved to Houston afterwards. I tell people she had a real job. And so I knew her to follow her to Houston. She's a CPA. So I came to Houston and just stumbled around trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life and didn't really,

couldn't put my thumb, perfectly on it and knew I enjoyed people and knew I enjoyed connections and talking to people and being busy and out of the office, definitely not in the office. And so I had a few jobs trying to get to where I ultimately landed. But in 2015, I was blessed to have some mentors of mine that gave me a little capital to start a commercial cleaning company. And so in 2015, started a commercial cleaning company. It's still in existence today. And we're super proud of that company. But that really worked my, what I now would call my entrepreneur. journey. I think even then I probably wouldn't even consider myself an entrepreneur, right? I would

have probably just said, yeah, Mark and Jeff gave me some money and I'm going to try to start this company. I probably wouldn't able to qualify it or quantify it and put words around it, but just knew I loved it. How did you get there? Like why cleaning, why Mark and Jeff? How did you get to that point? Yeah, why cleaning? So I had one of those companies I had stumbled around and tried what I wanted to do a little bit. I did operations for a cleaning company. I knew I enjoyed it, enjoyed the space, enjoyed the people, the people I got to work with. Sometimes, I, most of the time I enjoy the people I work with far more than I enjoy our customers.

But I loved that space. Then I went and sold insurance and did some other things. But why Mark and Jeff, it was really, Mark introduced me to Jeff, but Mark, I'm always telling people, get out there and do random things. I coached Mark's son in Little League baseball when he was in first grade. And Mark and I just hit it off. And he was just an older guy I looked up to. And so we got lunch a few times.

And that was a, goodness, that was a journey of four to five years. of just friendship and mentorship before it turned into investment opportunity. And even then, he's the one that spurred me on to do it. I probably look at my story, like, oh, man, how did you start that? Well, Mark told me to. Right. It was one of those things like he believed to me probably before I believed, or definitely before I believed to myself.

And so he saw something there and just said, hey, go do this. And so we started it from nothing. And now we're super blessed and got about 400 employees. And it's a fun, fun business. But so that's what started this quote-unquote entrepreneurial job. journey. But really, how we got to dig world is I've got three kids now. My oldest son was born in 2015. He was born four days before we started our cleaning business. And so that's always a good motivator. If you want to get out there and hustle, I have a kid, it'll teach you to get there and

sell something. But in February of 2017, my wife and I, we woke up our son, Pierce, unconscious in his script. He was almost two years old. We found out after we rushed him to the hospital, he had contracted back to her meningitis. He wasn't supposed to make it 48 hours. God had different plans and we were in the he was in a coma 12 days he was in the hospital 75 days and when we left the hospital peers could no longer talk he's in a wheelchair now he's deaf he has about 100 seizures a day mental capacity is probably a one year old and so we left the hospital 75 days later with a completely different kid and we didn't know what to do right like our like one day we're we're talking to him walking around throwing the ball to leave in the hospital 75 days later in a

wheelchair. And he's nine years old now and still has all those conditions, right? I haven't heard him talk since he was two years old. Hundreds of years a day. He's still deaf. Lower IQ by our standards about to say what. The kid is the happiest, most joy-filled kid you'll ever meet in your life. My wife and always say, man, it's great to be Pierce, right? He doesn't see the world. He sees the world the way we should see the world, right? He doesn't care about skin color. He doesn't care about your income. Doesn't care what your house looks like. He just wants you to be with him, right? just wants you to hang out with him. And so from that, Pierce said, it always, as always, it still does love construction equipment, garbage trucks, stuff, trucks, the whole thing.

So we came across this idea. My co-founder and I, Rick Bennett, and I said, hey, let's go build a theme park and with the mission of bringing people together. Like at the end of the day, that's what we want to do. It may sound cheesy to some, and I would say, I don't care. But really, at the end of the day, the thing that excites me is I can look out this window right here, and I see people in lines, and I just want to go talk to them all. And if we can have a chance to bring mom and dad and kids together, or aunts and uncles, I just met a grandpa who's been in construction 30 plus years

and he wanted to bring his grandson so he could show his grandson what he did for 30 years. That's why we do what we do. A byproduct of that is, yes, making money, no doubt, and creating a scalable business that we want to grow and grow across the country. But we really opened it with this idea of how do we bring people together. And so we started fundraising in 2019. I tell people all the time,

the two things that worked against us fundraising was one, we have a crazy idea. And it's one thing to pitch people, a real estate investment. It's one thing to pitch people, a cleaning business. Those are hard in and of itself, right? Because you've got to show them. But people can wrap their minds around it. You can wrap their mind around it. And so Rick and I, our joke always became, we'd go into somebody's office. We'd say, hey, listen, we got a great idea. We're going to build a theme part. Okay, I'm interested. Where are you going to build a theme part? Katie, Texas. Okay, it's a great, growing suburb, young families, love it. What are you going to do? we're going to let a three-year-old drive a skitt steer by themselves.

And they'd go, get out. I don't want anything to do with that. And so we had that working against us. And then in 2020, COVID happened. That was working against us, too. And so we finally got through persistence and crazy nights and crazy dreams. We got the park open in March of 2022. Okay.

So, okay. So a lot to unpack there. First of all, thank you for sharing your story. You don't know me, right? I'm just now meeting you for the first time. But we have a very similar story. my daughter contracted a terminal illness at age three. She's still with us today, but life was never the same, right?

She had a lung disease, and then we moved to Katie for six months, where you are, to get on the transplant list, and she got a double lung transplant. So we have very fond memories of that area because we spent six months there on the transplant list, but I'm very much driven by two things. One is a chip on my shoulder from people that doubted me. too from that like I want to spend time with my kids right because their time here is very limited and it's just always in the back my mind like you got to do better you got to make enough money to where you can afford to spend more time with your kids because time is short right so

I saw a buddy of mine sent me a tweet the other day and cheesy sure whatever but I think the point is true he said if you died today your work will replace you in approximately two weeks. But your kids can't replace you, right? They can't replace that time. And so I think it's one those things like whether you own your business or not, right? I think we look at that and we, man, work is the end-all be-all. And I think we're absolutely called to work hard. I think that's what we're supposed to do, provide for our family and our loved ones. But man, at the end of the day, when it's all set and done, right, it's hanging out with family. That's the important thing. Yeah. Yeah. The graveyard is full of irreplaceable men. So I have to think that in 2019,

team when you had this idea. Someone on some other corner of the world was doing this that you were pointing to investors saying, wait, but these guys are doing it. They haven't gone out of business. Like, was there another kind of template that you looked at when you launched? Yeah, no doubt. There's a much bigger version of us up in New Jersey. They've been around since 2014. And so, yes, there was a bigger version. They're there all day. Our model is a lot smaller. And we can get to that later. But there's is big part. You're 30 plus acres. You're there all day. full-blown food and beverage kind of operation. But we would point to them and say, hey, listen, they can do it.

We can do it, right? Probably that little Texas arrogance of like, you can do that. I've done the same thing. Yeah, a little laughing and crying as we go on. So, yes, there was somewhat of a model out there that we could point to, but not necessarily our model. And so there's still a lot of question marks. And then, again, right, Rick and I had never worked a day anything part.

And so I think that was always the next question. Like, cool, I get it. What do you know about a big part? And our answer would always have to be, just trust us, right? We'll work hard and figure it out. And the vast majority did not take that opportunity, the overwhelming majority, and the few that did, we love them dearly. So it took three years ago from concept to launch, right? Yep.

How much money did you have to raise? And what did launch look like? We ended up total raising probably close to $3 million. And launch looked awful. So I tell people all the time, one of the things that I like to say I have in common with Walt Disney is the day that he opened Disney, Disney World, they actually call it Black Friday. They were overrun with people. It was a terrible experience. People printed fake tickets.

And it was a disaster. Now, we didn't have people printing fake tickets. But it was a complete disaster here. And that was my doing, right? I made the mistake there. I pushed us to open too early. And what's sad about it is if you look back on it, we were probably only 48 hours away from when we would have been ready to open. But we opened 48 hours too soon.

all the technology wasn't ready. I was arrogant and I'm like, hey, we'll figure it out or hey, we don't need everything up and running. And we were blessed that we were overrun with people. The problem is that we were overrun with people. And it was a terrible disaster. And so we made the decision that night to close the park down for a couple more days

to get it right. And so I tell people, as I go on, I would probably be the only theme park operator in history that says, in one day I opened a theme park and the same day I closed the theme park. And so, but, you know, we've been fighting that uphill battle ever since, you know, because the media is a harsh thing, right? Everybody covered our grand opening. Every news outlet covered our grand closing. And then nobody covered us when we opened again. Oh, no. So, you know, I ran into a guy a couple weeks ago at the grocery store.

He saw my shirt and he said, man, such a shame you guys had to close down. Like, dude, we've been open for two years. But, you know, so we've been fighting this marketing perception, misperception for a while now. Well, they say any publicity's good publicity, but I would think that would be. one of the exceptions, right? That is one of the, yes, trust you found the exception. That's right. Jeez, Louise. So what specifically was going wrong?

Was it your tech, like your point of sale system? Was it the machines? Yeah, so it was actually nothing was wrong. We didn't have enough machines programmed yet. And so the technology was working. Like, we were able to open and people did some of the rides. So it was nothing that it didn't work. It was that we didn't have our technology on

every machine yet. So therefore, we didn't have enough machines going. And so people got to do it, but they waited in line forever. There was only a couple of machines operating versus now we've got 30, 40 pieces of machinery out there operating today. That day, it was probably like four. So it was again, the other thing was wrong. It just wasn't fully done yet. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk numbers regarding your property. So how many acres do you own the land? Do you lease the land? How many square footage is your building, number of machines. I'd love to hear all that stuff. Yeah, so we sit on three and a half acres here. So what most people don't know is we're actually a tenant of the mall that we're adjacent to. And so the piece of dirt that we sit on has been

a grass field since 1999. And it's just set here. And so we came in, Rick had a great idea of reaching out to the mall. And so we came in and so we leased the land from the mall. So we're just like a normal tenant here at the mall. We built everything out here. So what's funny is we have a lot of asphalt around the park. So people think we actually were a parking lot and we just put this in a parking lot. Actually, the opposite is true. It's a piece of grass that we put asphalt on to build our park. So we sit on three and a half acres. We have roughly all in, probably about 30 pieces of machinery here, 25 to 30 pieces of machinery out here, all different kinds. And then our building, so we thematically, the nice thing about building a construction theme park is you can essentially

put a job site trailer out here. I was thinking, I was hoping you were going to say that. Yeah, it's brilliant. But it's also, and it fits theme, right? So anyway, so we're sitting here. We have four wides. I think it's like 2,000 square feet total. It's our office, but also our retail shop and areas where people walk through at the end. It's like two single wides or?

It is four units stacked together. Okay. Same thing you would see on a job site, like a mobile home basically. That's it. Yep. That is brilliant. And it probably helped with like construction and zoning and getting approvals for stuff. Yeah, it was interesting on the zoning deal.

A lot of red tape, a lot of hurdles. because not many people build permanent buildings to be this, right? It's dropped onto a job site. It's gone six to eight months later. So we had to figure out with the city a lot of like, how do you grade this? Like, what does it look like to actually have it concreted into the ground or strapped into the ground? So there was a lot of back and forth there for a while that held up this specific building.

Our restrooms were made out of construction or, excuse me, shipping containers. And so we kept the theme there, but cost down by building out shipping containers. Okay. So when you were looking at the template in New Jersey for this, had anyone ever done this next to a mall before? Or were you guys the first at that? No. And really only the only template I would say that we looked at them for was, hey, you can let young kids operate machines. They are charging people for this and they're still in business. Five years later. That's right. Past that, there was nothing on their template that we were like, oh, let's just replicate that. It was more of like, hey, no, no, no, no. Trust me, Mr. Investor. You can take a three-year-old and put a, them on an excavator because they've been doing that. We, again, our technology, all that's all our stuff that we had to invent from the ground up, nothing, uh, from that template per se. Okay. To me, that's the brilliance in all of this is that you're in a mall parking lot. Like,

you've got baked in traffic on day one. I just think that I can't get over that. That's brilliant. Yeah. And it's interesting. Yes, there are definitely malls that are dying, no doubt. And as a whole, yes, I totally get that. The mall that we're at, though, if you find the right mall, 12 million people walk through this mall at you. That's insane. And that area is growing like crazy. That's right. That's right.

So there's a lot of factors that go into when somebody says, oh, you're about mall. Malls are dying. Maybe not, right? Both can be true. Yeah. If you're in Houston, Texas, there's always going to be a market for indoor shopping. The worst weather. Anyway.

Also, I feel like I have a framework with commercial real estate where it's like, you've got Froyo and Froyo explodes and then it dies. But there will always be Froyo places in the best locations, right? You've got like the cold stones and the marble slabs of the world. Same. You've got cookie shops. Like there will always be cookie shops in the best locations. There will always be indoor malls in the best locations.

And the ones in the so-so locations or bad locations will die. That's right. Yeah, that's right. So, okay. So let's talk about your equipment. 30 pieces of machinery. Do you own these? Did you buy them new, used, lease?

What are we looking at? Yeah, it's funny. I've had the pros of reading through some of the comments on the tweet that you threw out there. It's funny, right? What people come in with perceptions and ideas of how things should be or not. And again, a lot of it's like people guessing, right? They don't think you can do logically. They have no idea.

They have no. These are to answer one of your person's comments. These are real machines. These can operate on a real job site. These are, we bought them from Caterpillar. They did not. These aren't refabbed or refurb. These are out of commission machines.

These are very much new machines that we purchased. So we own them. And then we put on our proprietary technology on the back of it to be able to operate in a safe manner to where kids can operate. Like a governor, basically. Yeah, give or take that. Yes, on some of the machines, that's probably the oversimplification of it. But for example, on our excavators right, they go only certain degrees to the right and left, only certain degrees up and down.

They're stationary. You can't do anything to make that machine go forward or backwards. So the tracks are still. They're also on a timer so that when we activate the machine, the kid or adult gets to use it. And then when that timer is done, the machine keeps running, but the hydraulics are dead. And so that's how we get kids off the machine. If not, I'd have to be pulling Timmy off the machine every five minutes. And so that there's a lot of components that go into that.

But then there's override buttons and kill switches. Then we have the ability to flip it back when we need to do things around here, around the park. You can move things, move objects. we can turn it back into a quote unquote what we call a real machine versus the dig world mode. Okay. So do you own these or do you lease them?

Yep, we own them. Caterpillar must love you guys, right? Like you're a brand new customer that didn't exist to them 10 years ago. You're exposing them to all of these kids that might end up operating or buying one in 20 years, right? That's right. Yeah, that's right.

So I think our park wins, and I'll be completely transparent. Accidentally, unbeknownst of Rick and I, It wins on a lot of fronts, right? So we win with Caterpillar because Caterpillar gets their brand out here. They get their name out here. They get kids thinking about yellow iron versus green iron, and they get to grow up with that image of Caterpillar in their mind.

So whether they buy one for their self one day or they work for a company and they have the ability to buy, they want to buy Caterpillar. So they're working on brand identity, no doubt. The other thing, too, is we have partners. I went to A&M, Rick and I did. And so we have partnership with A&M. They're incentivized to educate the next generation about construction working, right? They know for a fact that they can get to a kid before they're in eighth grade.

So any time on that inspection from before eighth grade and convince them about construction work, they have a much higher probability of that kid going into that field because it's a lot like the military, right? You look at the military, people go, oh, I just shoot guns or fly planes. No, the military, you can do any job in the military, right? It's a whole ecosystem. And so I think the military has got the same issue where they're going, no, no, no, we don't just shoot guns and fly airplanes. Like, you could go here and become a doctor. You can be a lawyer.

And so I think A&M is incentivized, as well as other people in the construction industry to get kids at an early age going, well, hold on, hold on. You can make a phenomenal living in doing this. You also not necessarily going to be outside pouring asphalt every day. You might. But there's also a thousand other jobs that go along with that. Yeah. What does that partnership look like? Like, how are you helping each other? Yeah. So A&M, for example, they provided us. They had a bunch of undergraduates and graduates write our education. curriculum. So when we host the plethora of field trips that we have out here during the school year, we go through this educational curriculum. Also, if you were to walk the park, you'll see signs everywhere of fun facts about construction, right? This machine can lift this many buildings and this many elephants and blah, blah, blah, and random things like that. They cultivated all of that curriculum for us and made those signs and you'll see their brand around the park. Caterpillar, when you walk up into our park, you will see the big world logo and you'll see the Mustang cat. There

our local equipment provider here in the greater Houston market, Mustang cat. And so you'll see their name everywhere, right? You come into our retail shop on the way out. There's a huge Mustang cat wall that talks about all their offerings and what they can do for you or your business. Now, are they paying you for that, or did you get like a discount on the, on the machines for that? We have two different deals. So we have a sponsorship deal. So they are a sponsor. And then we were able to, when you're buying, just like when you're buying fleet of vehicles, right? When you're buying that much volume at once, you can negotiate some deals. So we're able to negotiate the price down a little bit. But also, again, another thing that most people don't realize,

when we were buying these machines, it was the tail end of the height of COVID, right? I mean, there weren't machines to be had. And so I think going forward, as we open up parks around the country, we would love to strike a bigger deal with the Caterpillar or the local dealers because the inventory is back. Then Mustang Cat, I mean, they're phenomenal. They're phenomenal partners of ours. They're also hand strung back then, right? It was like, hey, this is what we have and this is the price because this is all we have. So we have a paid marketing sponsorship on top of that. Okay. So was that one of your biggest startup costs, was buying these machines back in 2020? Yeah. And yeah, so yes and no, construction costs, right, a building the whole park, that's the

main startup cost, building something from the ground up. We can, we've been able to work in the equipment, the underwriting model through different financing routes, that kind of stuff. But the upfront but big cost was obviously the construction of everything. Okay. Now, tell me about developing the software to act as a governor on these machines. How did you do that internally? Was that, did you hire someone? Did you outsource it?

Was that a very difficult process? Yes. Yes. And so we have an engineer that works with us. And it's the technology he developed that we have the rights to. And so he is our guy. He was out here yesterday, tweaking some things. But yeah, it was very difficult process.

And again, can anybody do it? Yeah. Can anybody go pay somebody? Sure. But finding the right person that can, you know, because at this day and age, it's like a car, right? These caterpillar, these machines are computers, right? Like the car you drive is just a computer, right? At the end of the day.

Same with these machines. Yeah, they're still fundamentally the same thing that they were. But they're also computers now. And so we're essentially having to rewrite the computer that's in the computer to set our computer to it. Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. I love this business because some businesses just inherently,

come with, it's like they have baked in haters, right? Like when you post to social media or I post the social media about you, you know there's going to be like two or three categories of comments. It's going to be like, insurance. How do you insurance, insurance, insurance, liability, what, he must be an idiot. And then you've got all the people saying like, is this like, is this even safe? And then you've got people talking about the price. And like, I just love the idea of launching businesses that are reverse engineered from the

comments of other businesses, right, to where just a natural organic post from your business will generate all this negative attention that just tell the algorithms, hey, let's push this to a wider audience because people are talking about this, right? That's what happened with rolling suds, the pressure washing company. Everyone comments there like, oh, you're just spraying bleach all over. Is that even legal? Yes, it's legal to spray bleach in all 50 states. But people don't know that. And so they all comment that and it just grows and grows and grows. So without being said, what are your insurance costs like? Is that a lot? Significant line, Adam? Yeah, it's a lot. I think it's in line with any other business. Again, so I think the key to any business, right,

is you hit the nail on the head. I've got a great friend who's an insurance broker. I said, hey, would you ever want to underwrite digger up? No, no way. No way I'd ever do that. That's a crazy, and that's his perspective on. My best friend, who is our insurance broker, man, if you find the right people that believe in you, they will hustle to find the right carrier that gets what you're doing, Right. And so listen, it always cracks me up. We were like, man, how'd you ever get insurance? Well, hold on. Time out. How do rodeos get insurance? How do carnivals and malls get insurance? How did water parks get insurance? It gets a lot worse than this. Right. Listen, we've been very blessed, no incidents in two years, knock on wood. We continue to have no incidents. I think that one of the biggest misperceptions is, oh my gosh, these kids are just driving skits here through the park? No, no. They're driving on an enclosed track that we have double enclosed. We've got kill switches on the machines. Listen, our park is significantly safer than you go into a go-car park.

Yeah. But it's a new concept. It's a new idea. It boggles the mind a little bit, which is awesome, right? I mean, that's why we want to do it. And that's what we do, right? Let's go do crazy things. And so finding the right carrier that goes, yeah, okay.

I get what you're doing. Let's work through it together. Let's understand the technology on it. And so we're fortunate that the main carrier that we have, they underwrite those things. I just listen, theme parks, rodeos, water. So they are risk tolerant and get it. And again, when you understand fundamentally what we're doing and how we're doing it and the inspections that we go through, you go, oh, okay. All right.

I get it. Now, is it a big line on it? Yeah, because I've got running a theme park. But I would argue to you that our insurance lines are proportional to any other theme park out there. Are you able to say on a percentage basis or a real dollar basis what they are per month? it's probably anywhere from dependent on renewals and things like that, anywhere from 8 to 10%. Okay. That's not crazy.

You've got companies insuring tour guides that put people in shark cages, right? Again, it's always the human psyche I'm fascinated by, right? And what you said, right? You attract haters. You attract people that, like, champion you on. And you're like, you're the greatest person ever, right? And like your tweet, right? Like, we read that and like, man, dude, this guy, I don't even know this guy.

This is awesome. And so we love those things. But it's also funny to me, when you have something new that is by definition brand new, yes, I know people want to talk to the other facilities that are out there now. The preconceived notions that people walk up with, right, of going, well, I don't think it should cost this much money. I think I should, well, hold on, hold on, hold on. I love you. I love your opinion.

I'm here for it. But I've got a water park right over here across the highway. You don't go up to those guys and be like, listen, this is what the price should be. No. Yeah. It's because it's set. In the end, it's set, right? So there's also issues as you start things, right?

That fine line as an entrepreneur, and I think people listening to this, it's super important to listen to your customer. It's also super important to know your model, right? And also, we talk about the time, the silent majority. The silent majority never speaks up, right? If we go through the park and we go through, let's say we go through a whole month, we see five to eight thousand people throughout the whole month, depending upon the seasonality of what month it is. I get three nasty reviews. It'll keep me up at night. It'll drive me. It'll

bother me in my core. That's three people out of roughly 8,000 people. Now, that doesn't mean that all 8,000 loved it. Sure. Some may think of stupid, waste of time, waste of money, whatever, they're never going to come back. So be it. But if I fix it on those three of the 8,000, man, I'm missing the opportunity. I'll list you a podcast yesterday. The guy said, he owns restaurants. He says, it's never as bad as they say, and it's never as good as they say. And I like that kind of that level-headedness approach to it. Yeah, it's funny. I have this framework where I say, listen to the haters if the hater knows more about

your industry than you, right? Because when I launched my first business in college, it was an iPhone repair store. And this boomer was like, quote, mentoring me. And he had just owned like a home inspection business this whole life. And he's like, this is stupid. iPhones are like, this isn't, you can't build a business out of fixing this new thing. It was 2010. And I was like, yeah, these guys in Louisiana are doing it.

their opening stores all over place. This guys in Florida are doing it. Like there's none here. It will work. It's like, and it's just like, I'm not listening to someone that doesn't know what they're talking about. But if that guy was in the industry and he had,

and he's like, listen, man, I know it looks good, but here's what's happening. It's like, okay, I'm going to listen to this guy. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. It's funny because back to insurance, the most viral tweets I've ever had, I've always been about some sort of business that had an insurance component. And I tweeted about a zip line business last week. And I was like, and I,

people on purpose. I was like, tell me why this wouldn't work. Insurance, liability, insurance. What do you do about insurance? And my response is the same. It's like, you buy insurance. That's your solution. You pay for it. And then I tweeted, and this lost me a few followers. I said, insurance is the warm security blanket that people use to never start businesses. I'm like, oh, I can't. There's too much of a liability. I shouldn't. It's like, dude, stop. Yeah, I think I'm probably unfortunately on the record too many times and I've got buddies in both these spaces. So they've be saved to their face so I can say it. But I think lawyers and insurance agents kill deals, right? And I think they both have their place. I think they're both that's super important.

I think you need to listen to wise counsel of both. But man, a good attorney and a good insurance agent will be like my buddy who's awesome. He said, hey, listen, you're going to have to pay for this. We'll go find somebody that'll do it rather than no, you can't, if it's too crazy or man, that's like, no, hey, listen, I'm with you. I see the dream. I see the vision. Same with attorneys, man. You can get you, we listen sometimes too many of those voices. And we, in society, we put them on a higher pedal because they're lawyers, they're bankers. I get that. But a lot of times, man, it's just finding the right person that that goes alongside you and says, hey, it's hairbrain, but I'll be right there with you. And if we get it done, we'll get it done.

There's always someone for every deal. Like, there's always a way to make any deal happen. That's right. So you're talking about prices. That was the central focal point of my tweet is, how do you not charge more? And that's, I'm not like, this isn't a softball to get you to like sell yourself. I'm genuinely surprised how and why you don't charge more than 25 bucks for two hours. Yeah, it's funny. What's interesting is that we've been actually debating your tweet in the office for a couple of days, the psychology behind when you said $12 an hour. It's interesting because that's true, right? Like it's a two hour minimum. It's not how you, it's not how you frame it on your website. It's how I stated it. That's right. That's right. But in both are true, right. And so it was a very

interesting of like, oh man, I like the way you said because what's funny when you say that, I get complaints often about how we're too expensive. And here's, so we did a lot of market studies. We did a lot of studies on the water park beside us, some other family farms around us. We felt like 2499 was a good deal for the average family for the experience that we believe that we're providing. Now, I've got technically competitors of mine that just opened up a facility in Tennessee. Their kid price is 55 bucks and their adult price is 70 bucks. And now, again, different model. They want you there all day, bigger food and beverage, bigger part, totally different model. 2499 works in our model. If I see a certain amount of people annually, we're open 12 months a year,

so that helps too. We have other revenue streams like field trips and birthday parties that aren't just the 2499 route. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. But for us, what's interesting is the thing that gets held up. We talk about preconceived notions, right? The number one complaint that we get at our park is, oh, no, no, no, no, I don't need to pay. I'm just here for $10.000. I'm just here for Timmy to do the rides. Correct. Everybody that walks through a gate has to buy a ticket. Well, no, no, I'm just going to watch.

Totally understand that. You have to buy a ticket. The same would be, nobody would, everybody would think you're crazy if you went over to the water park and you say, hey, listen, I'm not going to ride into water slides today. Just Timmy's going to do it. So I don't need a ticket. No, you need a ticket. Same.

We try to tell people at the time, same with children's museums. I added children's museum, at least the ones around us. It's cheaper for the kid to go than it is the adult. and I can assure you I'm not doing those activities. So it's interesting that the psychology we give. Some people are, no, no, I don't think I should have to pay. I disagree with you. And so the-

How often do you get that a lot? Oh, weekly. Yeah, yeah, all the time. Okay. That's like the number one complaint. I would argue that is our number. Now, listen, it's the summertime. Our number one complaint's about to be that it's hot outside.

That's your fault. I have yet to figure out the solution to that answer. I know people always say, just put more shade. I get it. It's still hot in Texas. How do you do that? How do you do that? So that will become our normal one complaint here at about a week or two, but consistent complainant is I think it's ridiculous that I had to pay. And my son, my kid just did the ride.

Okay. So if a grandma brings her grandson in, it's a $50 ticket price for you and you're really only serving one of those people. In theory, yes. Yeah. Okay. Now, that makes a little bit more. What I tell people is nine out of ten times, the people that complain about, I watch. they end up getting on the machines anyways and doing the rides. And they've already paid for that, right?

They're right. They don't have to pay extra to get on the machine. Correct. That's the other thing is we're not a nickel and dime operation, right? That's the other thing we didn't want to be. So that's why that 24, we thought about, hey, you come in and every ride is five bucks. Or, you know, we thought about that. We don't want you to think about it.

When you come into a park, you can do everything you want, a hundred times. I want you to do it 100 times. 24-99 for that. The only things that you would pay extra for is that you're choosing. You can purchase a gem mining bank. You can purchase food and beverage. You can purchase a retail item. All three of those, though, do not have to be purchased to achieve the goal of operating machinery.

And so those three things are outside of the core of what we're doing. And so we feel fine charging for that, knowing that we can deliver the full experience for 2499. I don't realize you had a gem mining station. That's awesome. My kids love that. I think it's such. And you just buy the bags from somewhere else. That's right.

And all credit right there goes to my business partner when we started, again, none of us were in the theme park space. None of us knew really anything. And he went to a conference and he called me and said, hey, listen, we're going to buy this. And it was kind of the, I'm pulling the just trust me card. Yeah. It's an asymmetric bat, right? Right. And so even when it showed up, I was like, dude, I trust you, but I don't get it.

Like, I don't understand how this thing even operate. And I tell you what, man, that thing is our number one, you know, I mean, it's our number one generator of revenue because that would be just general. Outside of the main thing. That's it, dude. I mean, kids live over there. That's where my daughter wants to be every time she comes here. And so it's a good product. I mean, I do believe it's a good product.

And you get good things from it. And kids are fascinated by it. But it's hilarious to watch. That's because it plays on our human nature. Like it's inherent in our DNA that we're treasure hunters. We always have been. We want to explore and find something. And that will never go away.

And it does create a wonder in all, right? Like you've got this, you know, you've got this pile of dirt that all of a sudden you run through water and all some gyms appear. It's just wonder and all. sensation of it as well. Do you have any numbers on what percentage of kids buy the gem mining as well? Do any come just for the gem mining? It's a great question. I answer your second question. Yes. First one, no. You talk about the beauties of startup entrepreneurship is when you're trying to piece together your right systems and technologies and tools. The company we were with on our

point of sales system was good, it was good enough. Doesn't tell us enough data. And so the one we've just now switched to, we can start to get really granular. Like I can pull your, profile and how much you spent specifically on gym mining, all that kind of stuff. So we're starting to gather that data. But I would have to believe that is the majority of our guests, at least somebody in their party gets a bag. Really? The majority of your guests. Yeah. Again, that's me watching it for two years. Sure, sure. That's anecdotal. That's correct. That's surprising. That's, that must have really moved the needle for you then. It's a great, it's a great revenue driver for sure. Great calling.

Because you didn't even work that into your underwriting on day one, right? That was just a cherry on top. No, truly our underwriting, literally Rick and I wanted to make the model not work, right? I think that's important is figure out what breaks the model, right? Overly conservative. Overly conservative. And really, our only revenue line items were general mission. We thought we could sell some field trips and we thought we could maybe like food and beverage,

like just kind of like a big bucket for that. That was really the main revenue drivers. Do you sell T-shirts or hats or anything, any merch? Yeah, we got a 1,200 square foot merch store. Another thing that people, some have, it's always have a complaint. I force you out through the retail shop. Like, you have to exit the park that way. And so parents either love or hate me for that.

Yeah. But we force you through. It's an indoor. It's an indoor. It's an indoor. It's AC. So you come out of the heat, right? So you're like, let's just stand here for a second.

And we sell toys, books, hats, shirts, flashlights, backpacks, you know, your typical retail items in there. But unique, dig world things. Is food and beverage a, a sizable line item? Yeah, it's a sizable line item. You know, again, we only want you here for two hours. That's what we need for our model to keep people churning in and out.

So we only sell prepackets. So chips, candy, bottled drinks, ice cream. It's kind of something you have to sell, right? Like people literally need to eat and drink. It's not like you really want to make money on it. That's right. But I don't want to get into the, as of right now, at this park, this location, I don't want to get in the hot dog business or the hamburger business.

So that's right. We're going to keep it simple, and you can go to Chick-fil-A when you leave here and get food if you need it. Yeah, there's probably 13 within 10 minutes. That's exactly. Okay, so we got general admission, food and beverage, merch, gems. Is there anything else? So let's talk about field trips. I want to know, like, how that plays into your revenue, how that's priced, and what the strategy is there.

Yeah. So field trips, for us, heavily discounted a ticket for the kids, right? It goes anywhere from $4 to $8. but you're talking massive volume, right? So you're talking big volume, a couple hundred kids at a time. You're also talking about a significant labor decrease on my side, right? Because you're coming. So during the school year, our park is only open Saturday and Sunday.

We're open on certain holidays, but for the most part, it's Saturday, Sunday. And so the parks closed Monday through Friday. And so you can come and do a field trip on Tuesday morning at 9 o'clock. And I only need to bring, gosh, the tip of our labor. And so those are great margin items for us. And kids love it, right? It's a unique. It's totally different.

The park shut down. They get operated machines. Teachers love it because we do all the quote-unquote babysitting, right? Like the kids are in a enclosed area. They can run wild so the teachers can just kick back and relax and enjoy the park. So it's a good line out of it for us. I want it to be significantly higher line out of it for us. That's one of the growth areas.

And again, some of the things you don't know until you're in it, right? You start the business and you go, man, we're going to be able to sell field trips like crazy. Yes, is. the problem is when you're dealing with a school that's been around for a while, every first grader has their first grade field trip. Every second grade has it. They've got habits. They've got traditional. So I have to essentially convince you teacher to go to your principal and change this structure that's been in place for years. So it's one of those moments that like hindsight are like, oh yeah, that's been a little bit harder than we projected. But it's starting to become a bigger and

bigger line out of course. Yeah. Well, luckily you live in an area where, they're opening new schools like every month. And you can catch them early in that tradition. Exactly right. Exactly. I chaperoned my eight-year-olds field trip and they go to the Dallas Zoo every year. And he looks, he's looked forward to that one field trip for years. And it would be really hard to tell all the kids and all the parents, we're not doing that

anymore. Even if they're doing something that might be better, that's a hard sell. Are you actively trying to grow that or have they just kind of come to you? So we have a great person our team, Chelsea. She's actively trying to grow those. We're actively, I'm reaching out to people trying to figure out different ways in, different incentives to give people to come. But then a lot of it is organic because we have a lot of teachers that come to our park

on the weekend. And we have signs everywhere that talk about field trips. They go, oh, this is what I want to do. And so a lot of it's organic, but a lot of it, we go out there and hustle as well. You should listen. Do you ever listen to how I built this, the podcast? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, all the time.

Did you ever hear the one with the chicken salad chick founder? Mm-hmm. So she's awesome. Yeah, that was like maybe my favorite episode, but she grew in the early days almost exclusively by giving free food to schools in their break rooms. I feel like you could totally do that. You could get like a little display with small versions of your machinery and just buy them Panera or something. I feel like that would go a long way. Part of our strategy is going in before major holidays, before Christmas, before spring break, before summer, and we give the school tickets to give to every first and second grader for free.

Right. Hey, it's a free ticket to come. Because right, right, you're banking on park math, right? Park math is if one second grader comes, the family of four, so I get three other tickets that weren't going to come, but they saw this free ticket to go. And so we've been different drivers like that definitely help. Are you able to track any data on like a kid that came for the first time on a field trip and then came back with his mom or grandma later? Now we will be able to. Yes. Is that the whole idea with field trips or do you want field trips to stand alone as if none? of the kids come back, you need to break a profit. Both. So we definitely want understanding that most kids will never come back. But every field trip that leaves, we give them a free ticket to come back. And the goal is there, they go home and talk nonstop to mom or dad about how great it was. And then they bring the whole family on Saturday.

Okay. What percentage of capacity would you say you're at right now? Like if for the spot that you're in that one location, zero to 100 percent. Our attendance is gone up every year, and every year we feel different pain points, but then we work through them to where it's like, okay, that's not that we can do anymore. So I would say, or I'll say it this way. I guess I ask the question this way. Our target would be to see 45,000 guests this year total, manualized, right? I know we can handle up to 75,000 pretty easily. But so that I would answer it that way. That kind of helps. Yeah. Okay. So do you think

you could see 100,000 at like max capacity, or would you have to open during the week? I think we'd need to open maybe like on a Friday during the day to help for some of that. And then I would need to add a couple more machines for sure. Yeah. Okay. What about your staff? How many staff do you have? How many are working at any given time?

And what kind of roles do you staff for? Yeah. We have two full-time people. Our general manager is amazing and our events and coordinator, pursuerser is amazing. And then we have anywhere. So in our system, we employ about. like 55 to 60 people. On a given Saturday or Sunday,

anywhere from 18 to 25 will be here. And those range from just people that are working our attractions all the way to we have party coordinators that like Saturdays, like tomorrow, I think we've got like 10 birthday parties we're doing. So we've got birthday party coordinators that'll help facilitate those.

We've got a lead over admissions and we've got our social media person. And so it falls in that 55 would be all those jobs. Okay. And then how many, like what's a really busy day look like as far as attendees? You know, a busy day, I would say we've gotten up to, well, okay, a good day, if I look at the numbers, I'm like, today was a good day. We're north of 450 to 475 people.

Busy day, we've had up to 800 people on one day. Wow. And then are you doing anything to actively market other than what you already told me with the field trips? Or are you just leaning on the mall for stuff? No, quite the opposite. The mall is great. They're a great partner, a great landlord. But I would actually, again, another thing that we're trying to quantify this year is how many people went to the mall and they came to us? I don't think it's that high. And so it's more of we're just hammering the social media, right? We're targeting mom. We're targeting people to try to who's making the weekend plans and a lot of Facebook and Instagram. That's it. That's where we live. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's the mall idea, as brilliant as it is, you might have gone into it thinking,

all right, this is going to drive a ton of our traffic and then learn. Actually, it's not, but we don't really need it because we lean on social media so heavily. Yeah, I would say the biggest, I value at the mall is what you said earlier. We know people are driving to this part of town, right? So therefore, I'm not just way out in the middle of nowhere banking that like people will drive. Right. Because people are creatures of habit, right? For some people drive at 15 minutes is a far drive.

For Houstonians, you drive 45 minutes to get to your breakfast meeting, you know, kind of deal. So I would say that's where the mall benefited us is we know people are driving here. So therefore, they would drive here to go to a theme park. Yeah. Okay. Has there been like an unexpected marketing channel that performed really well, like word of mouth or something that just really surprised you? As obvious as it sounds, and I would say we didn't probably weigh this enough when we started is influencer brand engagement, right? Paying people or people that we do deals with that come out here, post about us, reaching out to paid and unpaid, that has driven most of our

traffic. Interesting. That makes sense. Just the video of what you do. is so compelling for people to watch. Sure. Yeah, and I think that's the other thing, too, right? I think this is with any entrepreneur, you get so used to your product, it loses its sizzle to you sometimes, right? Because it just is like, oh, yeah, that's what I do.

And oh, yeah, it's so routine for me, like, yeah, I can put my four-year-old daughter on the excavator load to drive it. If you just drop that normal conversation, you're like, excuse me, hold on, back down for a second. And so when you're right, when you just captivate somebody go, did I just see a kid driving a skittsteer?

Yeah, it helps spiral it out of control in a good way. Yeah. So if you were to be able to go back in time, what would you have done differently from day one that you can't really change today, if anything, knowing what you know now? Yeah, I think Rick and I would tell you the park layout. We've learned some things of like pinch points at the park, different lines that we didn't realize would be much longer than some of the other attractions. So I would say a lot of just the flow. I think we would change a little bit of the flow of the things. I'm not sure I would fundamentally change a lot of what we did. I think we did a lot of ton of research for a few years. Right. We had some great friends that helped us a lot. So I think we we got to skip a lot of the mistakes early on that we could have made. But I would say a lot of the, I would just say the design maybe would be some of things that changed. Okay. So with that in mind, what's next for Digworld? What are your world domination plans? If you're listening to this, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at info at Big WorldTX.com to find on our website. We are very close to starting to offer franchise opportunities

and by very close, definitely this calendar year. And so we'd love to find right partners that want to grow with us, a great brand across the country. We truly believe in our brand and believe in our, the hospitality and the customer service that we're trying to deliver. And we're looking for good people that want to grow alongside with us and have that opportunity to own your own business and do it in your own community. And so what's next for Dig World is growing franchises across the country. That's awesome. Yeah, I could, I think this is something, I think the whole experiential outdoor space is just at its very, very early days, right? The more the world goes online, the more we're going to want to offset that by stuff outside. I think that we haven't

seen the peak of that yet. That's right. Well, that's all I got, man. I love learning about your business. Thank you for coming on. You've got an amazing story and I'm really excited for people to hear it. Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here today. And we'd love to hear from any of your listeners and keep the crazy questions coming. We love it. Okay. Thanks, Jacob. Absolutely. Thank you.