Deep Dive with the Walt Disney of Youth Baseball Fields. Ep. #023

Then we went live on January 3rd with our first 14 tournaments of the year, our spring and summer ones. And we had over 400 teams sign up in two minutes. It jammed the software that we used.

Welcome to the Kerner Office. I am stoked about today's episode. I interviewed Lance Bird. He is the owner, founder of Rocker B Ranch, which is a massive baseball field out in the middle of nowhere, Texas, about an hour east of Fort Worth. And he sells pizza, he sells gelato, he has fishing, he has a swimming pool, he has a 15,000 square foot horse arena. He has everything. But it's really for baseball fields for youth traveling baseball teams here in Texas and really all over the country. I was just fascinated about everything. And I think this is Basically the Buc EE's of youth baseball fields. And so I want to learn all about it. And I think you do too. That's why you're here. That's why you're listening. So enjoy this episode of the Kerner Office. Please like and subscribe and share with your friends and we'll see you next time. So you're calling from the ranch?

No, I'm in Fort Worth. Not out there today. I was going to head out, but stayed here in town.

I got a zillion questions for you. Yeah, my first question is, what prompted this? Where did this come from?

I don't know. It's a love for baseball, our family's love for baseball. Growing up, I had two brothers and we played baseball just all the time. My grandfather was a big baseball player and would just take us to the ballparks all the time. And my dad played baseball in college and my little brother played baseball over at Washoe Baptist. I played briefly. I didn't really play. I practiced a lot, but briefly while I was at Baylor. And we just love the game of baseball. And we bought this Property back in 2005 and none of this was there. And it really wasn't a plan to build a baseball facility. It was just a family ranch. And we just wanted to have a place to get out there and get out in the country, get away from the city, ride four wheelers, mess around. And over time, I always wanted to be in the horse business, actually. And my grandfather, the same baseball guy, used to always tell me, we're not getting horses. The horses business is a terrible business. But I wouldn't listen to him. And when I first bought the ranch, we turned it into a horse facility. And like the arena that's there was a. Was a cutting horse arena. And actually the the first baseball field was a cutting horse outdoor round pen. And we did that for a little while. I realized my grandf was right and that I didn't want any part of the horse business. And so we tried to tell you and we just. It just sat there for a little while, those facilities. And when my son was about five, we started. We just took that round pen and converted it. We were just. Let's just turn it into a little wiffle ball field that be fun, just a place to play with ball, mess around. So we did that and then we turfed it. Put a grass down. Not turf, but natural grass. And I was talking with the groundskeeper at Colonial Country Club here in Fort Worth, and he goes, so, hey, could you come out and just look at my grass and see if you could help us make it a little nicer? And he's, yeah, sure. So he came out there and he just loved it. He thought the place was so cool. He goes, I'll help you make this really cool if you'll just pay me on the side. I did. And he taught us how to cut the grass with a real mower and how to properly fertilize it. And before you know it, this little wiffle ball field was just this kind of premium baseball. It was just. It was just very nice and grass was nice. And we started this having.

My.

My son was playing little league baseball at the time, and we started just having his team out. And a couple other teams came out and played a little tournament and it was. The kids just had a ball and everybody loved just getting out of the city and getting out there and relaxing. After that, it just. We started having a couple little small tournaments on that one field, and more and more people kept wanting to come, and so we eventually built a second field and. And it just kept growing from that. It's been a project that's. Like I said, I bought the place in 2005 and here we are in 2024, and now we have four fields and thousands of people are coming from all over the country. And it's just crazy. It just. It was never really intended to be a business. It just happened. It just. We just kept meeting demand as it came at us.

It's funny how the best businesses often start that way, right? Like, you just started it out of a passion, and it turned into what now is, I assume, an awesome business. I want to get a handle on the timeline. So you bought it in 2005. When did you say, we're done with the horse stuff? Let's put a wiffle ball field in here.

I'd say we started about that, about 2009. And then in 2000, around 2010, we started adding some hotel rooms. We didn't have any, you know, hotel rooms out there, but it's kind of. It's an hour from Fort Worth, but still people typically stay out there. There's a lot of places, a lot of people have houses out there at Possum Kingdom Lake and ranches out there. There's. There's some hotels in neighboring cities, but we started building some lodging and, and that was. And we just, we just incrementally just keep built, adding facilities as we go as we have the funds to do it.

Yeah, so you started with the one field in 09. Did you add the hotel rooms next or a second field next?

We built 10 hotel rooms in 2010. We built our first little kind of lodge and then we had four little cabins there. So we had 10 rooms and four cabins. And then we built a second field. And then it was about a few years later, maybe 20, 15, 16, 17, something like that, we built another 12 rooms. And then we built a third field, which is a height about the time my son kept graduating. Up to the bigger fields, we added a high school field because our first two fields were youth fields. The first ones, okay, 200 down the line, 225 to center. The second one's about 250. And then now the third one is 400 to center and 315 down the line, it's high school field. And then now we just have built a fourth field that's kind of in between the big field and the mid. It's more for 13, 14 year olds, like 275.

And are you adding these additional fields out of demand?

This fourth one we did, it was a mistake, actually. It was we getting out in front of myself. But we, we decided to expand here this last year, about a year ago, and we increased our hotel rooms to 50 rooms. We. We took back over the food and beverage service. We had farm that out before, but we took it back in and we had to. So many people were starting to come. We just, we had a lot of needs. Our swimming pool was. We built this little swimming pool out there several years ago, but it was just a residential kind of swimming pool when intended to. To have that many people. When all these folks started coming, we'd look up and there'd be 300, 350 people in this little residential swimming pool.

And then they get out and it's Almost empty, right? All the water displace.

It's hot. It's summertime. They're kids. It's hot. You're out in the middle of a ranch in Texas and it's important. The pool was important. So that kind of really drove some of this expansion was to. To build a bigger pool. We built a kind of an outdoor covered pavilion that just provides shade because it's hot and just place for everyone to get out of the sun. And then we built a big, large resort style pool. It's 115,000 gallons and 400 people. There's cabanas around it and we're still rolling that out. We don't have it all up and running just yet. The pool's open, but we're just finishing the cabanas and we've. We built a whole new kitchen to be able to provide the food service and redid the bar, remodeled the inside, provided more seating and created this kitchen that allowed us to be able to, you know, provide the food for all the people that are there. We're a lot, we're out in the country. So it's a ways for me, it's a little bit of a. Once you're there, it's 30 minutes to drive into mineral Wells to get something to eat.

So you got a captive audience.

We can, It's. That's a positive. But at the same time, we have to provide, we have to be able to service that. And we weren't able to do it with our. With our kitchen before, so we just had to do a big expansion and completely redid our kitchen, hired a new staff, got chefs on, on. On full time now. And it's all coming together really good. But it's just been a lot of. There's a lot of moving parts to it and it's taken. It's been a lot to get it all up and going.

I have to ask what, what happened to your insurance costs when you added that pool? Did that change significantly?

No, it didn't go up too bad because we had it before. The liability. We've had a liability policy on everything for a while. And that's not the killer. It's really the fire protection out there in this area that's so expensive. Sidebar. But we had a lot of fires out, these big wildfires out there really starting in about 2011. And for several years we hosted an event at the ranch called Buckets and Boots. And it was a fundraiser, it was a concert fundraiser for all the volunteer fire departments. And over the. We did that about five. Five years. And donated about a million dollars to all the local volunteer fire departments out there. But the fires are always a risk. There's lots of cedars out there and canyons and it's hard to get. They're hard to get to. And when the wind starts blowing out there, it's just. Can be. So really the fire coverage on the insurance has been the more expensive.

What does your insurance run nowadays?

Which are you talking about? On the property or the.

Yeah, just everything.

I don't have the exact number. It's a commercial liability. Not ridiculous. I'm not exactly sure what it is.

But it's not like a huge line item.

It's not too bad. No.

Yeah.

But the property is more than the liability. I know that.

Yeah. Okay, so back to 2010. You add 10 hotel rooms. That was right before Airbnb started. How are you marketing those out? Did you just throw a website up or.

We've never really done any marketing. This has all just happened just word of mouth. We put a few Facebook posts up and we've paid to push the Facebook post a time or two. Although really that the ones that do the best are the ones we just put out there. And all the word of mouth and people are sharing it, we'll put up. So this last January, we put out kind of one Facebook post a couple weeks before. We went live on January 3rd. And we just announced the dates and put it out there. A few little pictures and within. Then we went live on January 3rd with our first 14 tournaments of the year, our spring and summer ones. And we had over 400 teams sign up in two minutes. It. It jammed the software that we use. We use turning machine for the signups. It jammed the software and then it. It was supposed to restrict to eight teams per division. Puts us at 24 teams. And then we would typically add a few more. We can get to 28 or 29. But for some reason it didn't cut off at eight teams. And it let 35 teams in like 10 of the weekends, which we can't accommodate 35 teams with three fields. There's just not enough time in the day. So we were going to. This is. We're looking up January, the six. We've got 30 something teams and in nine tournaments what are we going to do? I either got to give everybody their money back and make them mad at the same time or we had to build another field. So that's what forced our hand here. And we just. In a. In a period of about 60 days built a new field, and it's. We were thinking about doing it anyway. We had a pretty level spot. We had some materials out there that left over that we could use, so we built a fourth field. It doesn't have lights yet, but we can use it during the daytime. And it's allowed us to be able to accommodate this 30, 34 to 35 teams that we have pretty much every weekend from here on out through the end of July until we sign up for a fall.

So that kind of accidental glitch accidentally taught you how much more or potential demand there was for your field ended up being a good thing, right?

Yeah, it's crazy. There's a lot of demand, and it's. It really blows my mind when you really think about the 400 teams signed up in two minutes. It's just. It really just blows my mind that there's that much demand and we're. I don't know. If I had to try to market this to create that kind of demand, I don't even know where I'd do it or how I would do it. Been fortunate that people enjoy coming and. And they talk about it and they tell their friends, and the kids love it. And it's. That's the cool thing about what we're doing out there. It's. We're trying to create memories. I want to create the absolute best baseball facility in the country, and I want, you know, kids to love coming there and parents to love coming there. We call it a tournication because there's a tournament going on. It's an excuse to go there, but it's a vacation. And the. The parents have a great time, the kids have a great time. All their grandparents and Uncle Joe and everybody comes. We started out doing these, and we would. We'd have about 35 people per team. Would. Would come to the ranch and we had a term. Okay, so there's one team. We'd have 35 people. That number's just continuing to grow. And now it's 65 to 70 people per team because they just. Wow. The. There's 12 kids per team. There's two coaches. You know, at least one parent usually comes, sometimes twice. But what to. But what we're seeing is both parents are coming, all their siblings are coming. Their siblings are bringing a friend. Grandma and grandpa are coming, the uncles are coming. Everybody. They just. They're bringing a big crowd. And we end up 65, 70. 75 people per team out there. And when you have 36 teams, that's just. That's a lot of people. And they're all. Not all there necessarily at the same time. They're coming throughout the day. They'll play the games. But now with the improvements that we're making, with the bigger pool, the cabanas, it's a resort. It's beautiful.

Yeah.

And plus, I didn't really talk about this, but it's an absolutely beautiful setting. I wish I had. I was out there and I could turn.

I'm excited to go check it out.

Yeah. But we're at the base of the Palopinto County Mountain, the Palapinto Mountains, and real scenic views, ridge lines and just looks out towards the Brazos river. And it's just. There's a ton of history out there. It's where Charles Good Night and Loving started. Their cattle drives for the Good Night Trail and, you know, tons of history with Comanche Indians and just all the Texas history out there. It's just a beautiful, beautiful piece of Texas and it's pretty rural and not developed like the city. And you just get out there and you just see your blood pressure drops and tension comes out of your shoulders, and you just enjoy being out there. And I think that's. I think that's one of the reasons so many kids and families like coming to our facility. It's relaxing. It's not. It's just different than every other youth baseball place that I've been to, and I've been to a lot of them, but people seem to really enjoy it.

Do you think people are going out of their way, literally, to sign up for games on your property because of the amenities, because of how nice it is?

Obviously, when that many teams sign up that fast. When we first started doing it, it wasn't like that we would. We had announced the tournament dates, and we get two or three teams sign up, and we'd start. We'd call everybody we knew and try to get more teams to come. And finally they'd come. But once more, people started coming and seeing it themselves and started telling all their friends mouth to mouth. That's really made it take off. And now we'll put a post out and there'll be. People will make some comments about the post that we're talking about the tournaments, but then they just start sharing it and they start putting their coach's name on there. And they're different people. They went and there's all these just kind of shares and people talk about it on their. On their team pages and forward it put their pictures out and it's just Great word of mouth advertising. It's just the absolute best kind of advertising you could have.

Yeah, there's a built in virality to it because by nature of the business, by nature of the sport, people want their grandma to come see, they want their coach to know about this facility and so they, they have to share it in order to really use it. Right. You can't, you can't just book it in a vacuum. You've got to do it as a team. So what are the unit economics look like for teams that come book? What do you charge them?

Most of our tournaments, some of them are three days and some of them are four days. So our three day tournaments are 800, it's $799 a team and you got 12 kids per team. You divide that by 12, it's was it 50, 50 some bucks. I'm not, I got to get my.

Calculator, something like that.

But. And then the four day wins are 1200 for the, the extra day and, and you get more games and, but that's relatively speaking when you look at some of our competition, the real exclusive travel facilities across the country, they charge a lot more than that. And we're on the low end, but I've been pretty sensitive to just the economy and we have a lot, we have a lot of teams that travel to our facility. They'll come. We have teams, we've probably had half a dozen teams come from California last year and several teams from Colorado, New Mexico, and a lot of teams from South Texas, Houston, Galveston, tons from West Texas, Abilene, Midland, Odessa. So there's a lot of travel teams that come, but a lot of them are just local DFW teams. And some of them, there's some teams that just make this their entire season. They just come out and play in our tournaments and it's a large part of the tournaments that they play in. So I've tried to be sensitive and just keep the prices down. We went through this expansion, I didn't really want to mess anything up. So I even know our prices and margins have gone, Prices have gone up and our margins have gone down. I still just been sensitive to raising the prices too much and I've just really tried to keep it affordable because we're in the, we're in the youth baseball business, the kid business, the family business, and we're, it's, we're trying to build a really exclusive facility and it can't be as cheap as some of the local tournaments that you have at city parks and stuff because there's just. There's just a lot of infrastructure. There's. There's just more needs that we have a lot of people. We'll have 75 to 100 employees a weekend out there. And we just had to build a lot of infrastructure. We had to. We're in an unincorporated area and there's no city to provide water and sewer and all that kind of thing. So we've had to. We had to become our own public water supply, which is a. It's a lot.

How did you do that? What does that look like?

It's all regulated by the tceq, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which is essentially the epa. So they regulate all that and there's just tons of complicated code. I didn't really know what I was going to do when this kind of first became an issue. I wasn't even aware of such a thing. We had an RO system, reverse osmosis system out there where we've made our water for years. And I didn't realize the need to become a public water company until I found out. But once you've had more than 25 people come to your business more than 60 days a year, you automatically become a public water supply and you have to meet these standards. And so I was really confused what to do at first. And we ended up hooking up with an engineer out of Abilene, Hibson Todd, who's actually Jordan Hibbs, the guy that runs its kid had been out there and played several times and he was the place and he called and said, hey, I'll help you figure this out if you want. I was like, absolutely. So we contracted with them and they've helped us get into compliance and we've had to spend some money and add some new tanks and new filters and do some things a different way. But. But it's now we have. Now we control our own destiny in that regard. We're not relying on city municipality to provide us water. We wouldn't have been able to add the pool and do some things based on the needs, you know about on the water situation out there. But now we can control our own destiny and do that. And along with that sewer, the sewer. We had to build a massive sewer septic service facility down there, you know, on our place that covers it all. But it's just. It's just expensive. It's more infrastructure.

Are you on city sewer or do you have a septic system?

No, we have run a septic. A very large septic system that, yeah, was pretty elaborate. We just upgraded that in this last little go around when we added the rooms and the new stuff and just upgraded that septic deal and it works. It's good. But just a lot of. There's unanticipated expenses that you weren't. There always are when you first went into this.

Yeah. In the RV business, it's the same thing. The biggest problem we always face is what to do with all the poop. How do we get it out? Right. That's like the biggest thing. I faced a lot of struggles in business, but I've never had to answer the question of what do I do with water? Where am I going to get my water from?

It's unbelievable. And plus, we. This makes a big impact on our community out there on the county. Palopinto county only has 27,000 residents, and we'll bring about 60,000 people to our facility this year. So it's. It makes a big impact. They stay in all the hotels and mineral wells and there's tons of VRBOs out at Possum kingdom lake and other little hotels and all the hotel occupancy taxes that are collected. There's two or three different hotel occupancy tax authorities in the county. The employment. We're one of the largest employers in the county now. We use lots of high school. Lot of high school kids and people that are just looking for weekend jobs because most of our employment demands on the weekends. So it works out good because those. The kids can. And they're hard workers and they need the money and want the money, and so they. They. It's been a. That's been a good solution to our labor problem.

Yeah. So let me ask you this. If it weren't for baseball, let's say you only had a ranch, a traditional ranch. What would your ranch look like today? And what would it look like if it were only baseball? If you didn't have any hotels supporting your baseball and if you didn't have any baseball supporting your hotels.

I'm not sure that. I don't know. The hotels make a big impact on the bottom line because that adds to it quite a bit. Would. It'd be a little bit of a struggle to probably do it without the hotel rooms. The food and beverage makes a big impact because they're just people being there and buying. Buying food and beverage all weekend makes a big difference. But the hotel definitely contributes. Our deal. There's lots of little buckets. We have a general store. We sell some rocker B merchandise out there. And that's a bucket, the kitchen and the food and beverages, there's a bucket. The hotels, it just all together, it works. Without it all, it gets thinner as you start taking buckets away.

Yeah. So if you're hosting a three or four day tournament over a weekend, can you pretty much not guarantee, but you're pretty assured that those hotel rooms are going to fill up for that time slot?

What we do is so we'll announce our tournaments on January 3rd or we'll do the, we'll do the fall tournaments in June 1st we announce the tournaments, they fill up on that day and then the next day we go, we open up the lodging so that before we would just open it up the same day and people would book a room but then they wouldn't get in the tournament. Didn't work. So now we wait till the next day your team's in that tournament before you go booking the lodging.

Okay.

And there's a, we have a, you have to book it for the whole tournament. There's a two night minimum or a three night minimum during the Texas title four day tournaments. But then once they book it, we know they're coming and yeah, we know the teams are coming. We know the, the hotel rooms are coming. So we can plan accordingly. It'd be hard to do it otherwise if you didn't, you know, have that assurance that teams are coming. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I noticed one of your comments, someone asked about the cancellation policy and we, once, we once, once you've signed up and paid and let's. We don't do cancellations now. If it rains out, we do, we provide a credit. It's a transferable credit that you can come to another tournament or you can sell that credit or you can give it to a friend or whatever. But it's not like you just don't get your money back. But we can't. The baseball business is tournament business. You can't have teams just like dropping out. It doesn't work because they want to go to a different tournament or whatever.

You've got 100 people on staff that need to know that they're getting paid that weekend.

Yeah. And that's like why we can't give everybody's money back on a rain out because it would just. There's 75 people there that there's bartenders, there's lifeguards, there's umpires, there's parking people, there's general store attendants or people cooking the food, people serving the food, bartenders. It's just a lot of people. And they have to get paid. It's unfortunate with a rains. And we do everything possible not to have rain outs. First of all, we spent a lot of money really working on our drainage. So we get the water all off the fields and away from the fields as quickly as possible. We have a great staff of permanent and part time people that get out there and we tarp the one field that has dirt on it and we just, we do everything possible to play ball because people traveling from across the country don't, you know, they don't want to credit, they want to play. And we, we do the best we can. And gosh, we've had just an unbelievable amount of rain this spring. It's, you know, it's very untypical for the area, but it's. We've missed. We've had to cancel a few days, but we hadn't had to. We haven't had to cancel a whole tournament. We've gotten most of our Friday nights in, most of our Saturdays in. We've had to cancel Sunday, I think twice just because it just. We got 12 inches of rain. It's hard to overcome that.

Yeah. What do the unit economics look like of building a field? If you were to have to add a fifth field to borrow, what type of costs would you need to set aside for that?

We build everything ourselves and we save a lot of money by doing that because we have staff on site and we do a lot of it ourself. Don't pay a contractor to come in and do everything. But I think we spent close to 300,000 on this last field that we just built. We had some pipe left over from that we were able to use that kind of cut some cost. But it just depends on whether you put turf down or grass down. There's a lot of how much drainage you do, how much fan structures there are. This one was not one of our premier. Like a couple of our fields have really nice structures and this has covered seating and it's nice. But we didn't go too elaborate on it. So that, that's about the price.

Wow, I must be ignorant when it comes to baseball. I'm a wrestler. I've got fond memories of going to wrestling tournaments all day. But I would have never guessed it would cost 300,000 to add a baseball field. What's the 80, 20 of that? Like, where is most of the cost going?

You got a piece of land, you got to. You got to build a fence around it. When it's a big. It's a big area, especially a high school field. Then you got to put the infield. You usually have your drainage that has to go in to get the water away. And then there's all the expense of the grass. There's some turf that we use. Even when you use the turf, you have to put a bunch of road base down. And the lights are. We didn't put lights on this field yet, but lights add another $100,000 to it. But then you can play. Play more games on it. So it's hard to make the. Make that work just on the team's paying you $800 to come. But it's everyone staying and enjoying themselves and taking advantage of all the stuff that we offer out there that that kind of allows it to work.

Yeah. So let's back up. I meant to ask this earlier. 2005, you buy the property. Where were you at in your life, in your career? You had young kids. I think everyone that lives in a city wants, like, has that dream of having land outside of the city. Right. I assume that you were no different. You wanted somewhere to go on the weekends. What where were you at in your career? How were you able to afford that? Was it. Were you already investing in real estate at the time? Were you a business owner at the time? I'd love to hear more background there.

My background's oil and gas business. And I lived in, actually lived in Dallas in 2005, and we had a company, Sundero Energy. We were active in East Texas, north Louisiana. We drilled natural gas and oil wells. And that's what was my primary business. And that's really what allowed me to do this, is taking cash flow from that business and putting it into this new one. And I. I have. I'm not really active in the oil and gas business much anymore. I still have some properties and stuff that we manage, but I'm not real active in it. But I've put more of my time recently into real estate and really real estate that I can improve things like this. I like the building process a lot more than the operations process, but I like improving real estate. I find it. It's fun for me. It's creative. Fortunately, my brother, I have a little brother, Bart Bird, who played baseball in college at Ouachita Baptist, and he lives at the ranch and he's the one that really runs the operations. My wife is true family business. My wife here in Fort Worth handles a lot of the business side and they talk all the time, and she handles a lot of the inventory and a lot of the corporate event marketing and booking and But Bart handles all of the baseball and he's really good with all the coaches and all the teams and the kids and really the employees. He recruits the employees that work out there. His daughter goes to high school there in Grayford and has a lot of friends there that. So they're a key part of the whole thing. It would be, it'd be pretty tough to pull this off without Bart and it'd be impossible without my wife. She's the boss. If one for her would really be.

Yeah. And what does your day to day look like then with regards to the ranch specifically?

I spent a lot of time just working. We're still rolling things out. We're not up to speed. We're not running on all cylinders yet. We, we just added a coffee shop which is a. It's really cool little shop and it's got gelato and coffee and snow cones and soft drinks and tea. Just different things. And we're still just rolling that all out and we've had it open now two weekends and just a lot of. There's a lot of moving parts to that. But we, we added, when we added the new kitchen, we added a wood fired pizza oven. And so we just three weeks ago started rolling the pizza out. And we're not, I don't cut corners on the stuff out there. I, I like to do it right. And I, we didn't want to have a par baked pizza. That frozen crust that you stick onto a conveyor belt and run it through in three minutes. We, we wanted the real product. And so when we hired it was really. We've put together a great kitchen staff. We've got just great group of guys that are running our kitchen and they look at this the same way I do and they want to do it right. So we're making our own pizza crust from scratch with just flour and yeast and making the dough and letting it proof and rise over a two day period. We're 350, 400 pizzas a weekend that we're just making by hand and rolling the dough out and when it comes out, it's cooked in a wood fired pizza oven. When it comes out, it's good pizza. It's not.

Yeah.

It's not just something you pick up in a gas station. It's really good quality pizza. And that's. That blows important for me to. People are coming out there for, like I said, for a vacation and they're coming to a baseball tournament but they're also coming to a little resort and they, and they. Their expectations are high. They want good food, they want good. A good bar, good beverages. I mean, so you have to do it right. And that's what we're doing. Spending a lot of time on just working out those logistics and providing a product that we're proud of.

It might sound silly, but that might be the craziest thing I've heard you say so far. Just the quality of your pizza. Because I'm a foodie, I've got like a wood fired pizza oven in my outdoor kitchen. We go, our favorite pizza place is Cane Rosso by the Star in Frisco and they import their double zero flour from Italy and they've got a wood fired oven in the shape of a cowboy's helmet.

And.

And they let it ferment for two days like they're doing everything that you're doing. But if I go to a baseball tournament in the middle of nowhere, I'm going to expect really bad pizza. And I'm going to be okay with that because that's just what you get at a sports tournament, right? So the fact that you're breaking the mold with these tiny little details is honestly shocking to me.

It's essential put forward a product like that. You have to learn how to do it yourself. So I'm like you. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to cook good pizza and I was terrible at it. If I bought a homemade before we rolled this whole thing out, I bought a pizza oven at my house and I started doing. I was on YouTube and watching these videos and I found this guy, Vito La Capelli.

I know. Oh yeah, I subscribe. Yeah, he's very entertaining.

He's the best. And I bought his master class how to make pizza and how to do it on a commercial basis and all that. And I watched all the videos and I probably watched them 10 times because, you know, every time you watch it, you learn something else. And then when we got. And we started taking this now to. We're going to try to do 400 of these a week. It's one thing to do 10 of them for 10 pizzas, but when you try to turn that into 400, it's. It's a little tougher. But Daniel and our guys, our staff out there, they all watch the videos. And he's the same way. He watched it three or four times and we just figured out how to do it. And after a little while it gets easier. And we got a big mixer now that, you know, allows us to do a batch of about 150 at a time. But we. Most of our tournaments are on the weekend, or some of them start on Thursday. You have that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and a lot of them Thursday to kind of prep. And that's what we just make all our dough and do all the thing. The other thing that we're in the coffee shop is our gelato. And I'm not just buying. I'm not buying.

I'm a gelato snob too.

I'm making it myself. We went out same thing. I just spent a bunch of time on YouTube and different researching it, figuring out how to make gelato. I bought a little small gelato machine for my house and started doing it and getting a little better and a little better. And when we rolled this out, we bought a commercial batch freezer now. And actually during the week, I actually run out there and make gelato a lot of times out there. Last week on Tuesday, amazing making gelato. I haven't turned that over to anybody yet. I'm kind of proud of my gelato.

That sounds incredible. What do you. It really does. Like, I'm such a foodie. I love gelato. We went to Italy as a family and I'm just. I'm a big fan of all these things.

And barbecue also. You were in Texas. Yeah.

We got to talk barbecue.

And so we've got a wood smoker there. And we cook. We prep all our own barbecue and cook our own barbecue. We've spent a lot of time talking about what we want our cheeseburger to look like and taste and what kind of cheeseburger we want. That's super important to me. The chicken strips. What kind of chicken strips we have. And I did a lot of that. That I did a lot of research by just talking to kids, my kid. And we just. Over the last few years, we've always run them by them and gotta have good chicken strips at a baseball place.

So if I expect to get a really good pizza that Neapolitan style, I'm expecting to pay about 18, 20 bucks. What do you guys charge for pizza out there?

It's a cheese is 19.99. And then you can add tacos on top of that. But yeah, about where we are. And it's a quality product. That's good. And first we were maybe burnt, getting a little too. A little too crystal. Too charred. So we had to.

It's only in there for 60 seconds. Right.

Our oven. So we bought this oven from a. It was from a Mr. Gaddy's Pizza place that had gone out of business. And it's just 6 foot by 6 foot dome oven that the floor spins and it gets up to 750 degrees. So, yeah, you put a pizza in there, it only takes, you know.

Yeah.

A minute and it's cooked and minute and a half and it's burned. You got to kind of watch, keep an eye on it.

I'm getting hungry. So of all the things like you're selling food, you're selling tournaments, you're selling hotel rooms, what has been like the most unexpectedly profitable or the most unexpectedly unprofitable item that you've sold or serviced? What's really surprised you?

Our merch has surprised me. It's really just taken off. We'll sell 4 to 500 rocker B hats a weekend, which kind of just blows me away. When we first started doing, we were just like, hey, let's. Let's have a little merch. You know, let's have some T shirts and some hats. And we were printing them ourselves. We. I bought this little. The kind where you got the thing. You're pushing it down and pulling it up and the workout. But we. I'd go back there. This is three or four years ago. We'd go down there on the weekends and I'd be down there just working like crazy. I'd print me 150T shirts or whatever and bring them up there and. And then they'd call me in 30 minutes and say, hey, we need more shirts. What? And then our hats. We were ordering the patches and putting the patches on herself and we just couldn't keep up. We were trying to do as much of that as we could ourself, but it just. We're selling the quantities. I think one weekend we sold almost 600 hats one weekend. And kids just. It's become. Kids wear them. You see them wearing them all over the place. You see them all the time at Ranger games and people send me texts. They'll be in Cabo and somebody will be wearing a rocker B hat or they'll be walking through an airport somewhere crazy and see somebody. And that surprised me. I just. The brand's cool and we try to pick out cool merch that people like. That looks good. But the amount that we've sold, it's been surprising.

Yeah. Now, what's something that you launched that just hasn't gone well?

I would say at this point it's all. Nothing's really gone bad. I haven't had anything that people were like, why'd you do. We try to. When we first did our. Before we opened the Coffee shop and gelato shop. We tried. We opened like a little thing, an old barn thing that we called the sugar shack. And a lot of the same stuff there, but it was off, away from everything. And that the location for it wasn't as good. And we didn't have. We didn't have the coffee, we didn't have the gelato. We didn't have everything yet. So we moved.

Like a candy store.

It was like that. It was just. It really just was snow cones and it was really a snow cone stand really. But the new one's attached. It's right attached to where the kitchen is, right near the swimming pool, right where everybody walks and where everybody is. And it's just a. It's a better location. So that's gone. It's gone a lot better since we got a little better spot for it.

Okay, now, do you think you'll ever be done adding on building? Is there ever going to be a time where you're like, all right, this is what we've got. Feel good with this?

I probably should be done, but I probably won't be.

When you're done, you run out of. Have you run out of fun? Right? Like, it's fun building.

I know. And I. How do you stop building fields and hotel rooms when they sell, when there's demand? I mean, all of our lodging for all 15 of those hotel rooms, double occupancy or two room, two night minimum, they all sold. Two of the tournaments had a few rooms left. But for, let's see, we had 14 tournaments. 12 of them sold out in two minutes. The other two took a couple more days to sell out. But they. Why would you stop? Build those rooms, pay out, you know, pretty quickly. And I think we'll definitely build more hotel rooms and I think we'll definitely build more fields. Just need to take a little break and digest what we've just done. But that's. That's definitely in the future, I feel like we're maybe halfway to where what I'm envisioning this place to be. I want to add some softball fields. We've had a lot of girls wanting to come play softball, and we've had a couple softball tournaments, but our fields really aren't softball fields. Softball teams like to play on all dirt infield or all turf infield. And we have mound the pitching mounds that get in the way. We have grass on the infield. They're just not softball fields. But I think it'd be really cool to in another little spot out there, have. Have Three or four just softball specific fields. And just every weekend you can have softball going on while the baseball's going on. But yeah, work through some of the logistics of that. Parking's a little bit of an issue. We gotta. We have to expand our parking lot and as a couple people pointed out on your post, I need to improve the part. It's been a little muddy here this spring but yeah, it's very. It's just not. It's typically. Rain's not typically an issue we're dealing with out there. It's usually drought but usually everything's too hot and dry. It's not. Everything's too wet. But we just keep getting this 10 or 12 inches a week of rain and it's just no place for the water to go. And so now all of a sudden a couple of people complained about paying the park and then it being a mud pit and they're right. I just. It just wasn't an issue until it was. And so it's definitely something we're going to have to address. But it's a big parking lot we've got. The one we currently have is 185,000 square feet and with the additional field and additional people we really need to probably expand it to 300,000 square feet. Yeah, that'd be. I haven't really. I'm trying to. We're doing some work to it just to get the drives and everything a little. Bringing in some road base and getting them better so that we can at least get people in and out. But at some point I'd really like to improve the lot and make it nicer. But it's just do it. Do it as we can do it.

Yeah. I put a road here in at my property. I'm working on it and I was shocked by the per square foot quotes and so to resurface 200,000 square feet you could be. That's a seven figure job and it's hard to justify doing that because of one unseasonably wet season. Right.

Yeah. Yeah you do. People complain about the 20 bucks. Million dollar parking lot at 20 bucks. That's a lot of cars. It's a lot of cars have to come through there. We're. And like you said, it's just not. It typically is not an issue. It's just this. We've just had so much rain so many weeks in a row and it's just never had time to dry out. Finally we. This weekend we just had the first weekend. We've got the whole tournament in without Having without missing a day because of rain.

Do you have crushed granite out there or what is there right now?

It's mainly road base now.

Okay.

A lot of the roads like the main road coming in and a lot of the area where everybody walks and where most of the traffic is chip sealed and we just reach up sealed, all of that. It's just our parking lot. The big. You go off the chip seal onto a road based little portion of the road to go into this road based parking lot. And that, that's where we've had the problems. And it's just. But it's in eight years of doing these tournaments that really hasn't been an issue until this year. And it just wasn't something we budgeted to fix because it wasn't a problem. I don't know. We'll see. It's a unique year. Of all the, you know, La Nina.

Do you, do you envision a day where the resort slash amenities side of your property outshines or overtakes the baseball side or do you think they're always going to be married?

It's a baseball complex primarily. And that's why people come. Kids don't come just to play baseball. They come to just run around and be kids. Like we have a couple of lakes out there that we keep stocked with fish and. And I see kids get more excited about going fishing than I do about the baseball game. I've seen. I see them coming out of the dugout, they'll throw their bag over there towards their mom and hey, come on, let's go fishing. And they grab their buddy and they're hauling across the over to the lake to just fish. And this, gosh, two weeks ago kid caught about a nine and a half pound bass out of the lake out there.

Wow. As big as, hey, throw that back. Say that for me. Now if someone pays, they love just.

Getting out there and being kids and the parents, they can run around, they can fish, they can play wiffle ball, they can swim. They just, there's just lots of activities and things for everybody to do and then the parents love it because they don't have to really worry about their kids. We're in a kind of. Once you come through the gates and come down the road to where the facility is, we have police officers on site every weekend. And it's not like you're at some sketchy community park. You're in a pretty safe environment and it's lots of, there's lots of staff and people around everywhere and people just, they enjoy the just getting away. Kids just enjoy getting out there and being, running around, being kids.

If a family pulls in and pays 20 bucks to park, can they do all the pool and fishing stuff for free, basically? And then they just pay for food and anything else.

Most places would probably charge a gate fee or a ticket or you have to buy a ticket. You know, if you go to Six Flags, everybody goes in, has to buy a ticket. But we don't do that. We just charge the 20 out of that. We pay our lifeguards partially out of that and just all the staff. And it all just goes into. Like I said, the buckets all go into one thing to contribute. But there's a lot of people that have to get paid and that just, that helps offset some of those costs.

Do you think you could ever see a day where people are coming and paying 20 bucks just to eat that amazing pizza or just to get that barbecue? Like, they have nothing to do with baseball. They're not going to swim, they're not.

Going to fish now. So it's like everybody that I don't, we don't ask you when you've come in, if you're there to play in a game or not. They just. If you want to come in and buy a pizza, come on. Yeah, get in there. But. And we, we also do a lot of other events out there. It's not all baseball. We will do 25 baseball tournaments this weekend, and those are all week this year. Those are all weekend tournaments. And then a lot. We also do a lot of corporate events out there. And those, the companies that come out there and have their retreat now we have 50 rooms, so you can bring a pretty good size group. We all the foods included, all the activities, the pool. A lot of times they incorporate wiffle ball and kickball and all those things in. We also have a Frisbee golf range and we have a. That's where we have a shooting, shooting range, skeet shooting range. That's not open during the baseball weekends. But it's more for corporate stuff. But the cool thing about a corporate event is once you come there, you. We rent the whole. You get the whole facility and that's the only way we do it. And so you're not out there and there's some other company here too, or some other people. It's. You get the privacy of coming out there and being able to do whatever business you need to do with your team or your staff and nobody else is there. There's privacy. People really enjoy that. And then we, we're really able to do. We're really able to do really good food. When we're looking cook cooking for those smaller groups. We're able to really. We'll. We'll add. We can add tenderloin to the menu or just all, all different kinds of options. Just whatever the client wants.

But do they pay extra for Pretty.

Much every company that's ever come out there and done a corporate event has called us and come back. We've. We want. We almost always have them come back.

And is that side of your business growing?

It is something we need to. We've gotten sidetracked. That's probably something we need to do a little bit more marketing and just let people know we do that because it's the baseball does so well with just the word of mouth people sharing it. But the corporate stuff, people don't talk as much about that. So that's an area we need to maybe have someone focused on a little bit more.

What do you charge for a standard corporate event and what it all is included in that there's packages.

You made a point on your post about 13,000 a night. That was the old pricing before. That's what we charged before we added the additional rooms. Now we have 50 rooms. So it's. Once we get an inquiry our. My wife who's currently our corporate marketing person will send some more information. It's. Do you have. Do you need 10 rooms? Do you need 20 rooms? You need all 50. And there's a different price structure just based on how many rooms you need.

Gotcha. And then do you include food with that? Is it usually an all inclusive.

We do provide the food but again you can lay out your menu do you want and typically people don't eat three huge meals while they're there all day long. They'll maybe have a light breakfast and a big lunch or a light lunch and a big dinner. And they spread it out. But we did. Lauren just sits down with them and talks to them based on their budget and based on what their food allergies or just whatever. Whatever they want to have on their menu. And then we just work it out with our chefs and just create a customized menu for we just whatever you want. Now we did. We hadn't had pizza in the past so that's going to be a new thing we can offer and it's pretty reasonably priced too. I anticipate a lot of pizza in the future. We're also trying to in addition to the corporate stuff we're also especially during the December. January February timeframe. We have a lot of kind of downtime right there because it's not very optimal weather for playing tournaments. And we try to do like some. That's the time when a lot of high school teams and college teams are getting ready for the season. They're getting in shape. And we've done several little kind of team building teams bring the, you know, high school teams will come out there for a night or two and do a team building deal and they practice on the field and they hit in the arena. Then they have their meetings and go over all their internal, you know, signs and all the stuff that they want to do. And we'd like to do more of those type events, especially in December, January, February. Just need to again, just get the word out there. That's an option.

Yeah. Now what about dove hunting? You offer dove hunting out there. Is that a focus or is that just a.

It's not really something we've ever really done. I've dove hunted out there and we've had some people out there. Did you see that somewhere on a. That was offered.

I think it was an old Instagram post that I saw.

I think one time we tried to. We did a post or something about maybe Labor Day weekend or opening weekend doing. Someone could rent it for a dove hunt and have it out there. But we don't. We haven't really done a lot of dove hunting out there. I've done it just myself and with friends, but I think it's actually, I don't think we're actually supposed to do hunts out there according to our insurance.

We'll edit this out.

Many of those.

Yeah.

Now what about.

None? Zero noted. Have you ever been watching a game out there and you just saw a superstar, you just saw a kid playing. You're like, man, that kid's going to be good. And then you saw him go on to do great things.

We've saw, we. We haven't been doing it long enough to see kids go on to play in the pros or anything, but we've had some really good teams out there. We had a team came out, 12 year team came out there that played their last. They were the, the Canes. They had their. They played their last four games of the season at Rocker B a couple years ago and they finished the season 101 and 0. That was their record.

Wow. Holy cow.

Kids played 101 games and won every one of them. And they, they got in a little early. They came from out of town and they were there and they were the night before the tournament started. They were all just, they're 12 year old kids at the time. My son who played high school baseball and he was like 14 I think at the time. And these 12 year old kids were. Every one of them were bigger than him and everybody on their team and they're sitting there just hitting home runs out of our field like it's, they're just like they're hitting a wiffle ball or something. It's just, it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. But we've seen some really talented teams and some really talented players for sure. I can't specifically say one's going to do great things, but I'm sure they will because just. Oh yeah, so many thousands of kids are coming out there every year. It's just law averages at some point. And it's. We get, our tournaments are competitive, we get. It's not. There's some really good baseball teams that come out there that really play the game. Right. And so it's, there's some talented kids for sure.

Now what about adding, what about building like an indoor basketball court where you could hold basketball or wrestling tournaments during the wintertime? Have you thought about doing that?

That is a good idea. We have a, we have an Arena, a big 15,000 square foot arena that was originally a cutting horse arena that we, we could probably enclose right now it's, we have batting cages in there and a wiffle ball field and there's a gym workout facility. Yeah, I don't know. It's just the economics of that. I don't know what it would look like. Building a gymnasium is expensive and air conditioning and heating it. I don't know if we'd have enough demand for that. But it's interesting.

Yeah. Like I grew up in Orlando, in the Orlando area and they had Disney's Wide World of Sports and we'd go have tournaments there. And I see this as like a Texas Disney. Right. Like a Texas Wired World of Sports. And the economics of both basketball and wrestling tournaments are pretty lucrative. We'd go to wrestling tournaments with 25, 35 teams there and you're there multiple days and I feel like you've built up so many amenities that would be so advantageous to host any type of a youth sports tournament. I posted a tweet a few months ago about a building I have on my property back here. And there's a ton of demand for training, youth sports training, especially in rural areas because the gyms don't know what to do with these kids. And there are Plenty of private trainers, but they don't know where to take these kids. Right. So I just think that if you continue leaning into the youth sports side of things, and not just baseball, softball, but shoot, you're not afraid to just build random buildings. Right. But up until now, the difference between.

Disney and Rocker B is if you're in Disney, you want to build something, you just got to call corporate and get them to give you the funds. I guess when you're a little mom and pop like us. I don't have any partners in this. It's just me.

Yeah, sure.

It all comes back to me. And I don't. I don't know. I got to be careful. The Capex projects, I take off right now. We have so many other needs. I think it would make more sense to build more hotel rooms. It make more sense to make it make improvements to our parking lot and then build additional fields because, you know, that just brings more people and the more people you have.

Does your arena have. Does it have air conditioning? Is it enclosed?

No, it's open air. So it's an old cutting horse. It's just open air. But it. We built it when. About 2006, back when I was trying to get in the cutting horse business.

Yeah. Has there ever been a time in the last 18 years where you've really worried, like, man, did I do the right thing? Am I on the right track? Or did you do it? So.

That'S just the world of being an entrepreneur you got. It's not for everybody. It's definitely stressful. There's. There's days when you're bulletproof, and there's days you're like, what in the world have I done? So it just, you know, that's just the way every business I've ever been in is like that. And people don't understand that. Everyone wants to, hey, I'm just going to build this business and go do it. But being an entrepreneur, it takes a lot of, I don't know, it's hard work and there's not. They're not always peaceful night sleep.

Yeah.

But it's now everything. We're getting to the point now where we built up enough scale. That was our problem a few years ago, is we just. There just wasn't enough scale to. To cover the overhead that you had to have and all the improvements that we needed. So as we. As it gets a little larger and more people come, there's, you know, there's just more scale kind of covering the business.

So if you could go back 8 to 10 years with everything now would what. Would you have built differently or would you have added something in a different order or would you have done everything just the same?

It's worked out pretty good and we've just done things out of necessity as we've needed to and have had the funds to do it. I don't know how much I would have really changed. It was pretty. It's a pretty cool spot. I wish. I really want you to come out there and see it. I'm gonna hold you to that.

I'm coming.

You really need to come see it. It's just.

I'm coming for the pizza. If nothing else.

It's just such a cool place. It just has a good vibe. It feels like you're in a little. You're in a little city.

Walk around.

It just feels like you're in some old deadwood city. Everything's rustic and old and. Or looks old and even. Like the little outdoor covered pavilion that we just built for shade is. We called it Goodnight hall after Charles Goodnight. And it's made out of old red brick and just looks like it's been there for a long time. And it's just. I don't know, I love the vibe of the place. I love what we've built. I don't know that I'd really change anything. No, I think it's. I love what we've done and I think it's. I think it's really cool and it's fun and I think all the people are coming and they like it too. That's the. Yeah, that's the best vote of confidence.

I think what you've done is such a testament to doing things slowly. Right. And just testing the waters, seeing how it goes, adding more. I think most people are expecting more results in a shorter period of time. And have you heard of the Lindy effect?

Lance, I want you to know the.

Lindy effect, it's basically the theory that the amount of time that a business has been around can predict the amount of time that it will continue to be around. So if you go invest in a 50 year old company, statistically speaking it's going to be around for at least another 50 years. And a three month old startup is probably out of business within three months. Right? So you've just done it. You've just done it, right? And you went into it with the intent not even to build a huge business, but let's just add a wiffle ball field. Let's see where that goes. Oh, people like it. Let's make this a real baseball field. Oh, people like it. Let's make another one. Oh, people need somewhere to stay. Let's add some hotel rooms. Oh, we have more baseball teams. Let's add another field. Oh, we have more people. Let's add more hotel rooms. It's just, it's. I won't say it's de risked, but you're mitigating your risk. And I think that's another misconception of entrepreneurs, is that we're these shoot from the hip risk takers, whereas we're doing a lot of research. We like. I do a ton of research before I take any risk. Right. And I'm sure you're the same way.

Yeah, it's. We've built it just like you just described. And it's. I don't know if that. This is the only business I've ever done this way. It's the only business I've ever done where I didn't have any partners in it. I've never just gone out on my own and done something like this. It's really just our family place. And it probably would have made sense that you probably could have done things. You can look back at that and could I have done things faster? Would it have been better? I don't know. Partners have opinions. And so it's often pretty. I had a pretty clear understanding of kind of what I wanted here and what I wanted this to be. And I want it to be, like I said, start a deal. I want this to be elite. I want it to be the. The best facility in America to go play baseball. And I think we're well on our way. There's. There's other places and that's. I was coaching. I coached my kids baseball when he played here in Fort Worth at West side Little League. Both my kids played and I would coach their teams. I coached their all star teams and I started looking for places that I could take the team I want. Where can we take them? Because your Little League's different than travel ball. Little League, you play at your little local place and then when you get to All Stars, you want to go play against some better talent. So we're like, let's find a good travel tournament to go to and. And just play against some better talents. Something to be really cool, really fun. Fun for the. For the kids. When you start really looking, there's not. It's not a lot of. There's nothing like Rocker B. It's a very unique facility. There's. There are some really cool places there's the, there's the Cooperstown place up in Cooperstown, New York where the hall of Fame is and it's phenomenal and. But it's. I think it's just for 12U teams and they're like. Their entry fee is $1200 per kid. That's a different deal. It's. You'll spend $17,000 taking your team to a tournament there. There's some other, there's some great facilities that, that Cal Ripken and Billy Ripken have built. The Ripken baseball guys at Pigeon Ford and all these really fabulous facilities. But they're. It's a little different. It's not as much the resort stay on site, fish run around, be a kid. It's just, it's a super nice, they're super nice baseball facilities but again you stay off site at off site hotels and I've done so much of that we traveling with my kid. I've just been to so many baseball tournaments and so many facilities all over the United States and they just, they make for long weekends when you're just sitting around a hotel, a Holiday Inn or something all weekend long. And then you just go over there at 5 o' clock and play your game and you come back and you're just, you're just in some random town somewhere just hanging out. And that's what I was trying to create was a destination. That being there is the cool part. Everybody and that's what we've seen happen, especially this year since we've added these, the new pool, the new facilities. People come and they just stay. They don't go back to Mineral Wells and just sit in the hotel, they stay out there all. Especially when the weather's nice. They stay out and enjoy the scenery, enjoy the view, enjoy the outdoors and all the things that we have to offer. That's what we were after is this unique facility that where you create these just once in a lifetime memories with your buddies and with your family. I look back over the baseball tournaments that I traveled to with my son and the time that we spent just driving down the road in the truck and it's priceless. It's some of the most wonderful times we've spent together. And that's what I'm trying to continue to build on is this facility where people just get to go out there and spend time with their families and their kids and just enjoy. Beautiful part of Texas.

Yeah. I can't believe it's taken me an hour to make this connection. But you're the buckies of Baseball fields. Do people ever refer to that? Do people ever say that?

I think there's a bunch of Buc EE's, though. We only have one, so you got to come to this one.

Yeah, just the experience. Right. Like they're going to you to play baseball, but they're not. They're going for the experience. Like you go to Bucky's to fill up on gas, but most people don't even fill up on gas. Right. Have you ever been compared to BUC EE's in that way?

I don't know. You may be the first. I think I saw something.

Let the record show it's me. I invented the BUC EE's. A baseball field.

Rock your Bucky's.

Yeah, it's the. It's very similar because you walk into a Bucky's and it's professional and it's clean and the food you buy is actually really good. It's pricey, but it's. Because it's high quality and it's really good and people care and they're nice and it's well cared for and. But they're in the middle of nowhere. They're in rural areas.

What you just said, so critical of any business. It's got to be professional and it's got to be clean. And we take. We go way out of the way. And we have a great staff of people that are all super nice and kind. Customer service is real important to us. We clean our bathrooms. We have staff out there doing that and just keep. And I walk around when I'm out there, half the time I'm just walking around picking up trash. I just. I don't. I could. I like it to be like Disneyland. I don't like. You go there, there's. Or the Masters. You walk around at the Masters, you don't see trash on the ground. You don't see cups laying. When you get 2,000 people, it's going to get thrown down. But I just. We. We have a staff of people that are just constantly picking up trash and keeping everything looking nice. And every night we go in and, you know, clean everything up and get the chairs back situated the right way. And it takes a lot of extra effort and extra payroll to make that happen. But it's essential. Everything has to be clean and professional.

Do you think this is franchisable? Do you think you could ever expand this to other areas?

Our facility is unique because of the. The landscape where we are. It's just absolutely gorgeous piece of property. And it's. So you'd have to find another. I think that's part of the vibe, is just how pretty it is out there. But it. I bought it a long time ago and bought it out in a rural area hour away from the Metroplex. And I'd say that could probably replicate. I've had some people ask me about it. I've had. We get tons of ex pro baseball players out there. There's just been hundreds of them that are. They're coaching their kids now. And there's been a few of them that have asked me about opening one in California or opening one in different places. And I. We're still drinking water out of a fire hose, just finishing everything we got here. But I wouldn't say no, but it's not something that's on my current agenda.

Yeah, I feel like you could put one in the Ozarks and it would have a similar topography. You could put one in the Smoky Mountains as well.

I would definitely have some partners in that. I'm not going to go doing more of those myself, but. Yeah, maybe. We'll see. We'll see how it goes.

I've been in your shoes when things are going and you're growing and you have a system and there's just all these shiny rabbits that's just calling to you, but you just know if you just keep doing what you're doing, you're just going to keep crushing it. What's the point?

It'd be neat to have some. It's fun to think about, but at this point, it's just. It's everything I can do to keep this and keep us moving along. And I'm not finished. But it's like, yeah, we've come a long way, but it's still. There's just still so much to do. And there's so much. There's just so much demand that is just. That we can't meet just because of capacity. It's. It should at least take a couple days to fill your tournament up, I would think. I mean, not a couple. Yeah, I think that means crazy. We gotta keep. Keep doing a little bit more here to get to the point where we can satisfy the demand and.

Are you doing corporate events during the season? Are you waiting for the off season for that?

No, we do. Yeah, we can. Okay.

Just earlier in the week, it's easy.

Really easy for us to do like a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday type of deal. Monday usually is a. A lot of cleanup and straightening everything up and staff and everybody kind of catching their breath. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, it makes for busy weeks, when you got another group, you got to clean everything and clean all the rooms. And then the kitchen staff doesn't have their time to do all their prep. They have to because they're preparing meals for another event. But. But we've done it and we'd like. We can do more. We just gotta. Just. We just have. We haven't really marketed the corporate stuff.

Yeah.

Quite the degree we need to. But. But it's really, It's a cool spot for, for having your corporate deal because just like I said, the privacy of the whole thing and just all the things are to do. We have about a mile jogging track or kind of walking track around it and a lot of people go on hikes along that. Just, just a lot. It's a lot to do out there and it's relaxing. So how much of your footprint I think our corporate stuff will build here over the next year or two?

How much of your footprint are you using right now on your acreage?

We have 320 acres and I'd say we're utilizing 35 or 40 acres of it. So there's a lot of additional land for that. And it's all. About 60% of it is open and pretty flat and about 40% wooded. But there's a lot of. A lot of just flat open land that it'd be real easy to build additional fields and additional lodging. When we were building the lodging we have, we did a lot of things in advance so that when you add additional lodging down the road, a lot of stuff's already in place. The infrastructure, the water and the sewer and all those Internet. We just had to redo all of our Internet. It's out in the middle of nowhere. So there's just not any. That's not a lot of infrastructure.

No infrastructure. Yeah.

But now we've done a lot of that and we've taken these steps that are going to make future development easier and less expensive.

Now I got to ask. 2005 was a really good time to buy real estate. What did this land set you back then?

Oh, gosh, it wasn't very much. I think it was like. It's around. I think it was like 1500 an acre or something. It was a long time.

Oh man. You can't get a single family home for that much in. In Plano nowadays.

That's why I would just. It would be hard to. Yeah, I'm not saying I won't ever have competition around for this, but sure, it's. It would be expensive to build now. Because you just. The land alone would cost so much more. But then the. We've built this all over time. I built this, the horse arena, that. Which is now the indoor facility. And we built that in, you know, 15 years ago. Just everything cost less back then. And I was doing it. We just. We just have incrementally added things. And this. Just recently we did this kind of bigger expansion. And that was an aggressive move, but something we needed to do. And so I'm glad we did it. We're just finalizing it all. We're just finishing. We have a short window to build stuff because starting in March we have tournaments all the way through July. And then we break after the second week in July until September because of just. It just gets so hot. It's just. It's too hot to play baseball. And so we. We take a break there and we start back in September and we go till November. So you basically have December, January, February to build stuff. And we built a brand new kitchen, 28 hotel rooms, a commercial swimming pool, resort pool with cabanas, pavilion, covered open air pavilion and the fourth field all in about 90 days. It was just. We were. But we were going fast. It's one of the benefits of being out in an unincorporated area too is you don't have a municipality that you have to have to permit everything with. You just permit with the state and so it. You're able to move faster. But it was pretty aggressive. We. We went at it pretty hard for it. It was a. And we're still just finishing it all up. We're still trying to finish everything. We haven't rolled the cabanas out yet. We're hoping to do that here in two weeks at our first Little Texas title event. We just got the pizza out, just got the coffee gelato out. So we're just. We're just finishing it up and cleaning everything up and getting the roads all tightened up. It's just. It's hard to go that fast.

Where do you see rocker be in 50 years? What's the. What's the big picture? Goal for it? Keep it in the family. Sell it. What do you think?

It's interesting. It'll be interesting to see. My daughter's about to graduate. She's just finished her sophomore year at Baylor and she loves the ranch and has talked about coming back and running it and working on it. I don't know that I'll be doing it in 50 years, but I don't know if I'll still be around. But I don't Know, it's hard to predict the future sometimes, but I know we're having fun right now, and I know it's a lot of fun building these facilities. It's a lot of fun to see all these kids and people come out there and the smiles on their face, especially. We made it through Covid, and we ended up having nine tournaments during COVID and those were some of the most rewarding ones because, man, people wanted to get out and get away and get out of the house. And we were in this rural environment. We reached out to the governor and they. He gave us a kind of a special little. Was about to do this little special thing for us. He eventually opened it up for all the youth baseball facilities, since it was outdoors, that we could start having tournaments. And so we had nine tournaments during that pandemic, and they were just some of the most rewarding. People were so happy to just be out there, and it's just. It's just cool to see everybody come out and have a good time and enjoy the. Enjoy what you built and appreciate it.

Talk about a roller coaster. I imagine when Covid hit, you were stressing out, and then you became one of the only facilities that were allowed to open, and it's just 0 to 100, right?

That's when we made our MO. We got our most momentum, really. We were really working hard to get tournaments full the year before that. And then during COVID everyone found out that we were having tournaments, and so teams started. We got it. There was a bunch. It generated a bunch of stuff on social media, and people just started. And that's when our tournament started filling up. During that time, and then the year after, it just really took off. And then this last year has just been even faster. Every year just gets a little bit. I always. I always worry about it. I hope everybody signs up this year. But then we announce it.

Yes.

It's a couple minutes later, they're full. So it's been cool.

Have you ever crunched the numbers on what percentage of all baseball teams within a couple hours, or, like, what percentage of the market you have and how much left there is to go?

There's probably, what, eight and a half, nine million people that live within two and a half hours of the ranch. When you think about high school kids, youth. Yeah.

Yeah.

We don't do as many high school tournaments. Most of ours are more. Up until we peak at about 15, 14, 15 years old. The high school teams, it's a different. It's a different deal. We've had a few high school tournaments. But they, by that point, kids are just really looking to get recruited for college and they want to go play in the perfect game. The different tournaments that are more recruiting oriented, plus they don't bring 65 or 70 people per team. The kid drives out there in his truck himself, plays his game, goes home. So it's just a different, It's a different model. But, but we're just, we're focused really on about 8 and 9U up through about 13, 14U with, with 12, 13, 12, 13, 11, 12 13. Kind of our main area.

Yeah. I would think with as busy you are, there's still a long way to go with regards to how many teams are actually using your field every year.

It's hard to know. I don't know how you really find out that information. It's because like I said, we had. We just really haven't done much marketing. I don't know how to even do it. We just. And a lot of the. We'll put our post out and I'll. My Bart, my brother does most of them, but we'll see the, we'll see the response that we get. And sometimes some of them we'll put little videos out that maybe 75 or 100,000 people will see. It's just cool. But obviously there's a lot more just interaction between people that have been there. That's. It's that word of mouth sharing that people are doing that's. I think we're really getting a lot of momentum. We don't really see all that because it's happening on other people's pages and website. They're just, you just, you can't put a value on people saying nice things about your place. Yeah, but that's really what's driven a lot of it, I think.

Yeah. Lance, I want to be respectful of your time, but is there anything you're willing to share about the, the size or scale of your business? What are you. Size of a small restaurant or a small country?

Not a country. I think we're, I think we're going the right direction and I think there's a lot of potential in the future as we kind of finish rolling everything out and getting everything operating efficiently on all cylinders and then eventually taking steps to add more capacity, whether it be a field or more lodging on site. And it's just how fast you tackle all that and how you approach it and especially in this environment where you can't go borrow a bunch of money to do all that stuff in this environment. So you Just have to either have equity or cash flow. And in all of our. We pour all the cash flow back into the business. It's just. We're not. We're just constantly compounding. That's just our. That's our motto is constantly improving. So we're just trying to get better and make everything better all the time, and it just takes everything at this point. But I really. I feel like we're going the right direction, and I feel like in the future, there's. It's gonna. It's gonna be very rewarding just because we're just trying to do everything the right way, and we're trying to build a facility that. That not only are we proud of, but everybody wants to come to it just because it's unique, it's different. It's clean, it's nice. The food's good. Margaritas are good. You Talked about our 16 margaritas, too, but that's another thing. We're. It'd be one thing to. To pour a sugary margarita mix into a Dixie cup and call it a margarita, but ours are quality margaritas. It's two shots.

What's the tequila you use?

I think it's Casamigos, I think.

I've never drank alcohol in my life, but my friend was asking. He's. I wonder what type of tequila they use.

But I think there's two shots of premium tequila. There's a shot of Cointreau, and. And it's all made with fresh lime juice, and it's all fresh products. We don't. It's the same as the pizza. We don't buy the little.

Yeah.

Sugar. Mix off the shelf and pour it in a cup. We do it the right way.

I'm sold. If you put that much attention to detail into your pizza, I assume you do it with everything.

I'm impressed. You know who Vito was?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He hit like, a million subscribers a while back.

Isn't he awesome?

He's a good guy.

I need to have him out. I need him to come check it out and see.

You should.

He was.

You're a protege.

He was our. He was our inspiration.

That's funny. Lance, thank you for your time. Yeah, I love learning about this.

I hope it was worth your time. I'm glad you reached out, and it's been fun talking to you.

Yeah. All right. I hope it lived up to the hype. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Lance, and I would love for you to subscribe and share it with your friends. We'll see you next time.