Making millions with massage chairs, indoor sledding, alpine slides and candy! Ep. #029

Candy store in the tourist areas or in an airport. But, like, why don't you ever see them in strip malls?

Or, like, I, I, I totally.

Why can't you take a candy store? You know how sometimes you can buy candy, like, by the pound?

That's what we do.

Yeah. Why can't you take, like a shrunk down version of that? Take like the 20% most popular items and sell that as a service to gas stations or something where it's like, listen, here's, here's the scale, here's the bags here. We're going to refill it. You don't do anything. People, they'll weigh, they'll check out. And it's going to take 80 square feet. And you can just put it like, kind of like the Hunt Brothers pizza model at gas station. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this was the best episode I have ever recorded of the Kerner office. I interviewed a guy from Twitter you've probably never heard of. He lays low. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. His name is Matthew. He owns a bunch of really freaking cool businesses and an alpine slide, an indoor snow facility where kids can go sledding, all kinds of really unique businesses. And you would never, ever, ever have heard of either this guy or his businesses if you weren't listening to this right now. I promise, every minute of this episode gets better and better the more you listen to it, because we get more comfortable with each other. We keep talking, we're ideating, we're coming up with ideas all over the place. This isn't just like a ploy to get you to listen to the end, but it gets better as you go. And we're going to talk again in three or four weeks. Let me know if you want to have him on again because we only got to, like, a third or a quarter of his businesses. This guy's freaking awesome. We came up with amazing ideas that you can copy yourself. I hope you love this episode. Let me know. Email me if you do Chrisofounders.com and I will have him on a second, third, 30th time whenever you want. Anyway, enjoy. You go by Matt or Matthew.

I get called both, but usually Matthew is what I say.

Okay. It's funny because you own so many things that, like, I'm looking up to you.

Right?

Like, I want to talk to you.

No, no, no. I appreciate that. It's something that I feel like just watching your stuff, that we are very much alike in terms of just, like, enjoying new things, enjoying making things how things operate. Definitely how things tick and exploiting opportunities when it makes sense. Yeah. I don't know. That's the vibe that I get from you. And hopefully I'm close to. Right.

Yeah, no, that's it. I'm just curious. And I'm too impatient to, like, to not find answers to things. And then once I find an answer that's like, oh, this business could work, I'm too impatient to not try to make it work, like, right away.

And yeah, like, I even. I wouldn't call it impatience, but, like, when you set this up, I was like, yeah, let's connect whenever. And then you're like 3:30 or 2:30 or whatever. And just that directness of like, well, let's just do it now, let's do it tomorrow. And that catches me off guard a little bit in a good way. It's just I could do some more of that in terms of just making things happen and pushing things forward and. Yeah. Just even appreciate. Yeah. How you went about that.

Yeah. Well, thanks. Yeah. And transparently, when I have an opposite reaction, like, all right, well, let's. Yeah, let's explore that some. It's like, I'm just not that interested.

You know, there's an endless amount of cool things, cool people, opportunities, and so, yeah, if you don't, like, get in front of that person or whatever. Yeah. People find other things. So, yeah. So anyways, I have admittedly not watched your show. Mainly that's okay. Because it, get. It would get me so, like, anxious where it's just, like, listening to you or reading your stuff or, like, listening to a great podcast. I start having so many ideas, and it's like, I can't do that right now. I'll save it for later.

Focus.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've got a lot of catching up to do in terms of your videos and stuff. I definitely want to get through them all over time or whatever.

Yeah. Well, I just want to hear, like, why don't we start with you just telling me everything that you own, like, everything that you're doing that you're comfortable talking about.

Yeah, of course. So, yeah, just as, I guess, a disclaimer. I am totally fine with whatever question you want to ask or whatever. And worst comes to worse, I say we'll save that for later or something. But, yeah, feel free to ask about anything. And I was thinking about how to explain where I'm at and what my history is and boiled it down to I grew up in a very, like, entrepreneurial, free household where I was allowed to build and experiment and fail and all this stuff. And so what that has led to is this isn't planned but I feel like every two or three years I do like some major, major project. And each time I do a major project it's bigger than the last one, whether that's good or bad. And then mixed in there's all these little. Whether they're experiments or one offs or whatever. I think part of that is I just love the novelty, I love the creation, I love just trying new things. And so anyways, yeah, so the big stuff, I think we originally connected on Pigeon Fork Snow, which it is an amusement in Sevier County, Tennessee, which in case people aren't familiar, that's home to Dollywood. And yeah, it's a total tourist town. And that provides a lot of opportunity to be unique in terms of creating amusements and restaurants and even lodging that people haven't seen before. And so anyways, I built Pigeon Forge Snow. Built it in 2017 ish and opened in 2018. It is a 35,000 square foot building that is indoor snow complex. It's open all year long. One thing that is really unique about it is it's something called temperature independent. And so basically when you go in the building it ranges anywhere between maybe 65 degrees and 72 or whatever. It is not a what they call sub zero facility. We're open all year long and yeah, it's a pretty big operation. We've got, depending on the time of year, we've got 30, 40, even up to 50 employees. We staff around the clock. We've got a morning and day shift that leads into the afternoon and evening shift. And then when we close the public, we have a third shift that comes in that blows snow all night and we do it all over again. And for the most part, yeah, we're open up 365 days a year unless there's something crazy. So anyways, I guess my baby and before that, I guess the major project was I built an alpine coaster or a mountain coaster right around the corner. Yeah, yeah, just a couple miles down the road. And that was maybe 2000, 2014, 2015. And I had never even heard of a mountain coaster. It was brought to me through a group of people in town that were also amusement operators and owners. And they sent this video of this other business, this alpine coaster and there was like an hour long wait all day long.

I was like, where was this one at?

So it's on where's Valley Road? But it's. It was the first one in the area. It's called Smoky Mountain Alpine Coaster, and it's just a couple miles away from Pigeon Forge now. And.

Wait, so I. Sorry, I meant the one that they brought to you that had a line out the door was that one in Pigeon Forge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you would agree with this, sometimes the best opportunities are, you know, being inspired by other people's work and being respectful of that. But, yeah, understanding that there was a market there and trying to capitalize on it. And so anyways, this group formed, there were 10 people, with me included. And the big thing was, hey, these alpine coasters, they take a lot of area, and land is at a premium in that area. You need the elevation change to make the uptrack work, along with the gravity of the downtrack. And so there's just not a lot of places that you can build something like that, zoning, all that kind of stuff. There's a place right up the road, just coincidentally, of that competitor that was identified, and we ended up leasing part of this guy's property to build it. And it was awesome. Like, it was such a cool experience. The. The company that. That builds most of these coasters, they're out of Germany, and they just. They're incredible with, like, their precision and their engineering and everything. And so basically you write them a big check and they build all that in Germany.

How big of a check are we talking that.

Okay, so now, keep in mind, this was 2004, 2015 numbers. The coaster itself was probably maybe 1.6 to 1.8. There was maybe half a million in terms of shipping and that kind of stuff. You had to build it, which was probably another million. But it's a mile long track, six or eight foot sections at a time. Steel. Yeah. And so it's a giant LEGO set, basically. But still, it's a lot of work. And. But it's a pretty simple concept. All it's basically, again, it's. There's a loading station and there's single carts. It holds two people, but typically it's just one person. It connects to a cable which takes them all the way up the up track. Just like maybe a traditional roller coaster. Get to the top and then gravity does the rest, and they zip down about a mile. And what's really cool about it is you can control your speed, you've got handles, and you can go fast, you can go slow. And we capped ours around maybe 30 miles an hour, something like that. And when you're a couple inches off the ground at times and going 30 miles an hour, it feels way faster. I have seen grown men scream and stop and all kinds of stuff. And so anyways, it was and is a great ride. We went into this alpine coaster boom where after us there were a lot that were popping up in the area. But everyone's kept doing more and more money. It was just something that. And it still is something that really resonates with people. The whole family can do it. Personally, I don't like riding roller coasters. I get motion sickness. So even with me, you just go slow and you enjoy the view, or it's a great date or with kids or young, old, everything. And so it really, really resonates with people. It is the. The most shocking thing was when this first one opened up. It is. They were about 15 or 16 a ticket. And. Which doesn't sound that bad.

But that's for one ride, right?

One ride. And that's four, five, six minutes, depending on how fast or slow you go. And there's a discount for a second ticket. And you would see people get off the ride, smiling ear to ear, buy another ticket, even at a discount, but then go get back in line for sometimes up to an hour or two to just do it again. And so it was just something. It's. They're great, they're fun. I always recommend them to people.

You didn't foresee that. That people would ride that many times?

I ride and I don't know, I think I'm frugal at heart. And so it just like. And then you start thinking, how are.

You spending this much money?

Yeah, yeah. And it's something that. It's something families, four or five. I believe you have several kids, Is that right?

Four?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you know better than I do.

We went. Yeah, we went in Pigeon Forge. I don't know if it was yours.

Or not, but do you remember the name or.

I. It's probably in my email. I've been thinking, no problem.

So ours is very easy because it's like the most obnoxious one. It's. There was an existing business there called Goats on the Roof. That is a shop that literally just has goats on top of it. And so anyways, you would definitely remember if you went to ours.

No Goats.

Okay? The no Goats and not us. No big deal. There are so many in town now, but, man, they're just great. They are these turnkey businesses, believe it or not, you have the capacity to write a fairly large check. And if you have the spot to put it, it is. It's actually business pretty easy. It's a giant assembly line, and it doesn't take that many employees. You can.

Especially compared to your snow place, right?

Oh, yeah, definitely. And so anyways, we had success there, and I learned a ton. I was the largest shareholder there, so I felt like I had a responsibility to do everything from marketing to operations to, yeah, I'd be working a ticket booth when somebody wouldn't show up. And. And so anyways, I was also by far the youngest in the group. And the group ranged from, like, me, who was probably late 20s, maybe 30, and the oldest guy there was maybe like 88 or 90. And so there was, like, huge mismatch there. And whether it's right or wrong, I think I developed a real chip on my shoulder of that. I was the kid or didn't know what I was doing or all this stuff. And so as that ship grew and grew and grew, I reached a point in a couple years of running the coaster. I was like, I need to prove to, like, the whole world that is not true, that I am creative and I can succeed. And that's when I started thinking about snow. And again, I can't stress it enough. There was nothing like that at the time. And so, real quick. Yeah.

Can I ask a couple questions before we move on to snow? I've got like, a zillion questions.

Ask all you want.

What made them want to come to you in 2014 to be a shareholder? Had you already done cool stuff or not cool?

By probably their definition, it was a money thing. And that's a whole nother lesson of the group was broken down between some sweat equity in terms of putting the deal together, and obviously, at some point there has to be money. I'm a little rusty on the numbers, but I think we. I think the group put in maybe a million dollars all in all. And we borrowed. I want to say, 2.4, 2.2, something like that. And. And so anyways, my family is fairly well known in the area. I come from several generations of entrepreneurs in the real estate space. And so anyways, I think it was just something that the name was known, and that was how that connection was made. And at the time when that got brought up, the plan was like, okay, let's invest 25, $50,000. Let's just buy a lottery ticket. Sure, whatever. And things kept happening where maybe somebody else dropped out or they couldn't find another investor, and one thing leads to another, and it's like, oh, my gosh, here we are, like, writing bigger and Bigger checks and. But then it's like the sunk cost fallacy is like, mend this deep. Let's just keep going. It's not going to be the end of the world if it doesn't work out. But this was not the original plan. And so anyways, that's how that that wound up.

Okay, so that probably also put a chip on your shoulder where you're like, listen guys, I'm more than just a check. Like, I could do this myself. I don't need all you.

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was the. The number one thesis like, hey, man, this alpine coaster just opened. It's the first one in the area. They're crushing it. They can't keep up with their demand. There needs to be a second. We could be the second. Was that kind of the whole thesis?

Yeah, definitely. If anyone's even vaguely familiar with kind of the Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg area, it has this bad rap of that's just go kart tracks and T shirt shops or whatever. And a couple decades ago, it definitely was that. But the reason it was that somebody opened up a go kart track and there's wild stories of especially for credit cards were prevalent. Just massive amounts of cash, a lot of probably shady. Yeah, accounting and taxes and stuff. And so you see somebody doing that and then somebody opens up one beside the street, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it seems like there was just this demand for go kart tracks and T shirts. And so that's why we wound up with so many things like that. But obviously people want more than just to ride a go kart track. But a go kart track is something that anybody can comprehend how that business works. It's very easy, very familiar. And then maybe you add. You spice it up a little bit and you have a tunnel or something. And the coasters were very similar model. And I think the main reason it exploded like it did in our area and across the US Is because, again, it is, believe it or not, very turnkey. It's engineered. This company from Germany, pay them to come out, they'll drop the site, plan all this. If you hire construction crew to build it, then it's just like go kart track 2.0. And so, yeah, I think it's just very accessible. And that doesn't seem that intuitive. It's like very turnkey. And so anyways, I think that's why I forget what you asked, but I think that's why that was popular and that resonated with entrepreneurs in the area.

Okay, so you and a few Others put in seven figures. You borrow seven figures, probably takes one to two years to get open or so we.

About a year we had hiccup after hiccup and ended up getting close to the end and ran out of money. In hindsight, the guy that put the budget together, it was like on the back of a napkin.

He.

He was just guessing on stuff. And we're like, okay, yeah, that sounds right. And so then when it's like, man, like you didn't include like the cost to pave the parking lot or whatever. And. And so we. I think we were short maybe 400 to 500,000. And I don't know the attitude of the bank at the time, but they. They extended our loan that amount. I think they were probably also like, hey, we're this deep in it too. And so anyways, yeah, so yeah, we put in about one and probably ultimately borrowed two and a half, maybe 2.75.

What did opening week look like? And I also want to know, like, first year, what did that look like? And then as more competitors, what did it look like last year on a revenue traffic basis?

Yeah, so I. I have always loved marketing, especially like growth hacky little like tricks. And at the time, Facebook had this ability to where you could download these tools and stuff and basically go to a competitor's business page, download all their users. And I've done that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's. It was amazing.

And then you retarget to them.

Yes. And basically uploaded all of the competitor who the competitor was doing and still is amazing. They have. They went viral. So many anyways, and so their Facebook page, that was when Facebook was really popping off too. And so I. For months I ran these ads against their list and basically said something like, if you like them, come check us out, whatever it said. And we also came in at a lower price point too. I don't know if that was good or bad, but we're angled the cheaper one. And so I.

Are you still the cheaper one?

Marketed pretty heavy. So fast forward a little bit. I sold out in 2021, 22. But yes, they are still, I believe, the cheapest one.

Okay, so you marketed pretty heavy.

Market heavy. We opened up in like a nasty February day or whatever. And I remember we opened up and we advertised a $5 ride for our first couple days or whatever, which is really cheap. I remember we did like, I don't know, eight or ten thousand dollars. And everyone was like, oh my gosh, what'd you expect? The weather was so bad. It's kind of it was kind of in the off season and I don't know, maybe. Maybe a few thousand. But I wasn't really familiar with that. The amusement business yet. I remember that whole week I worked the ticket booth. And so somebody would come up and say, I'd like whatever, four or five tickets. And I punch it in and I'd say, okay, your total is, I don't know, a hundred bucks or whatever. And when I would see the hundred on the screen before I told the customer, I was like wincing because it's like, oh my gosh, they're going to say no. Yeah. They're going to yell at me. All that kind of stuff. And it was just amazing. Like people on vacation.

Yeah.

Have a different mindset. And so we were very heavy in cash in. We were probably 70% cash, 30% credit card. And you just see people open up their wallet and just toss you 100 bucks. And I remember the first night we didn't have a safe. We didn't have anything. And I used to always carry a backpack around. And so I just. That night I just shoved all the cash.

Like seven grand.

Yeah, yeah. And my kitchen table. Just lay it all out and whatever. And it was very. In terms of the operations, very hacked together. Very. Just build and iterate fast. And that. I love that. That is so me.

It's the best.

And. Oh yeah, definitely. And it's something that first year we probably did, I don't know, maybe $2 million, give or take. We just sold two things. No, sorry. We sold three things. We sold a ticket, which was adult ticket and the child's ticket, which is $12 and $15. Then we had a rewrite ticket which was $5, which is very popular. And then we also had a photo booth that would sell people their photos on the. And so anyways, that was 100% our total revenue sources on the property. Like I said, there was an existing business, this kind of gift shop and food and goat food and all of that. And so I don't know his numbers. I would guess he definitely, revenue wise, had to be over a million dollars. And so on the property there was probably three, maybe $4 million changing hands. Obviously I didn't have access to part of that, but anyways. Yeah, that kind of gives you a. Kind of a. Yeah. A range. And so our first year we did really well and we continued to grow. We. We built the coaster pretty much ourselves. Like as in somebody in the group had a construction background. And, and, and so anyway, so we. Every year we paid the price in terms of you, you've got this massive steel structure on the side of the mountain. This mountain. And we would get, when I say shifts in the track, I'm talking about 4 inches here, 6 inches there. But this, the design was so precise that if, if you, if it started to get out of whack, you just got grinding and wear and tear and so basically what where I'm getting at is we close maybe every year for anywhere between a week to three or four weeks to fix stuff that I don't think other coasters went through. And so that always, I feel like shot us with having that like just blowout year and but we all, we were very consistent. We just, we had a lot of things working against us. But the profitable. But just you want to see that growth. You want to double every year or whatever. Yeah. So pair that with like literally some years. There were two coasters being built that year and every year there was a new competitor. Wow. And yeah, I think the area. So Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg. I think they're up to maybe 10 coasters now. Wow. And I know of at least two that are planned and I assume going to get built. And I studied the competitor, the original one Smoky Mountain alpine coaster so much, I would go down to their parking lot and I'd sit there on my phone and just kind of do the. Yeah. Count how many people. And man, like they never slowed down. And it's still to this day the most baffling thing to me that especially them, it was almost like the more competition that came in, they were doing even more themselves. And, and, and, and so anyways, that industry is very strange in terms of the demand and the supply. It's something that I keep thinking that.

It'S going to be saturated.

Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't seem to. And the profit margins are incredible. And so it allows a lot of room for error there. The fourth, maybe fifth coaster that went in the area. I remember I knew some people involved with it and I can't say 100% sure, but I think their budget was about 8 or 10 million. And at that time, and even still this day, I was like, that amount of money, that is insane. But they print. And so it really shows that if it can support a build out like that, regardless what their terms are, whatever. Yeah. It's just impressive. It just shows that the demand is there, it's still there. They're all, I think doing well. And so it's a super interesting business. If you haven't done a deep dive on them, like, oh, I'm planning it now. Yeah, yeah. And I've thought a lot about where are other areas that you can do those. And they're all around the, kind of.

Got to have the terrain, right?

You have to have the terrain, which so something really cool is the German company, their name's Wiggins. They were innovative enough to figure out how they can build these without having these massive uptracks. And so basically what they do, you still have to have quite a bit of area and elevation, but they chop up the uptrack. And so maybe instead of a thousand feet or whatever of uptrack, they might do three or 400ft of a smaller uptrack, do a smaller down track, do another up track, and so on and so forth. That coaster I was referencing earlier, with the eight or $10 million budget, they have four up tracks. And that was the first one to do that. And I thought it would fail because the best part of the coaster is the downtrack. And so you would go up and then just when you'd start getting going and you're smiling and you're going fast, you're stopping again and you're doing another. Okay, let's slow down, do another up track. To this day, I do not understand why people resonate with those, but they do.

Do they like. Or are they just in business because they don't know what they're going into when they buy a ticket?

I thought the same thing. I was like, ah, they will, they'll burn out because word will get around and blah, blah, blah, blah, man, I was wrong on that.

I, I what do they charge more? 3 times as much, right?

Well, sure, they're probably, I don't know, $18, something like that. The best scenario is when you can put two people per cart. It's just wildly more profitable. Almost all of it is automated and has gotten way better over the years. And basically the operator is responsible for helping the customer get on the cart, making sure they're buckled in. And then past that, the computer kind of takes over. And so basically a perfect scenario is a cart leaving the station maybe every 20 seconds, 18 seconds, something like that. And I've done this. You can work backwards on the math there. Even the best of the best coaster, they're capped at whatever that is. And there are definitely times that we operated, a lot of times that we operated every 20 seconds. That does take some skill. That is not just and, but then you're always going to have, you're going to have somebody that's up on the down track and freaks out and goes really slow, slows the whole thing down, this and that. Yeah, just a bunch of crazy stuff. And the carts are really cool because they developed a system that basically it's an automatic braking system where they cannot, they cannot collide. And so if it senses a cart going slow in front of it, it will slow down too. Now some people get really pissed when they're halfway up and they're slowed down to crawl the rest of the way because grandma is just enjoying the view. But minus those things. Yeah, like you can again, you can work backwards on revenue. You're very weather dependent. Summer is by far the best season. They made these, I call them rain shields but basically like a plastic covering. And I don't know, I don't think that really resonates with people. People do it, but they're going to be way slower when it rains. But the insane thing is there are a lot of people that still want to do it in the rain. It feels terrible as it's just pelting you in the face. And it's something that they'll sit there and wait for the rain to clear and do it again. And so anyways, weather dependent, temperature dependent, there is no worse feeling than when it's 30 degrees and you're going 30 miles an hour down that hill. Your face is just frozen. There's still people that do it. And so anyways, you kind of hack together somebody's revenue if you give good estimates for those categories. I just said.

And what are your net margins? Like either yours or the industries?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's something that with all these kind of amusement businesses you're really heavy on initial investment and really depends on how you like amortize that or how you're accounting for that. But you know that. And then your costs from there you've got next to no utility costs minus bathrooms and a little bit electricity. You've got a little bit of a repair and maintenance budget and ongoing. And then staffing wise you can run the coaster with three or four people. Probably good to have six or seven. But so anyways, when you kind of work backwards on that, once you get over your hurdle rate of just debt service and stuff like that, there were definitely times we were over 50% margins. And then. Oh, oh my gosh, yes. And you just gotta think the cost of selling one more ticket once you're over that, like it's nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your staff's already there. The electric's Gonna, the lights are gonna be on. And so it's about, can you be somewhere that you have enough demand. Yeah. To get that hurdle right. I would be interested in doing another one. Not in my area, but I think the cost now to do it. If somebody asked me to look at their budget and they were thinking about doing one, if they were less than $10 million, I would be asking a lot of questions. And so you know that hurdle of 10 or 12 million dollars, however you acquire that money or debt or whatever, that adds up, if it's percent interest rates or whatever, they're still doing them. So obviously it works. But I would be a little bit more hesitant on that. But I've seen other areas where people have put these in. There's a little. There's a little town in Georgia, Helen, Georgia. And I think there's a couple there that do okay. Branson, Missouri has several. I think they do well. I've never seen a coaster close. We'll put it like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some out west in the Rockies, I guess, that are beautiful, like insane views and. Yeah. So if you can find an area that makes sense from just a demand wise. The elevation is tough, but not impossible. If you're in. Well, even like I. I've brainstormed ideas like, how could you do it without any hills if you're in like Kansas or whatever. I don't know if it'd work, but I've got.

It's just a roller coaster at that point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so especially if you did it like in Kansas, I know nothing about the Midwest like that. But you'd really want to be confident you've got the demand. But that's something too. It's like if you're in an area that there's not a lot to do in terms of like for kids or birthday parties or whatever like it. I think it'd be such a hit. And so yeah, I love coasters. I think they're great businesses. We were really big on safety, just running a really safe operation that was important to me. We probably spent more on those kind of costs than most, which I would never encourage somebody not to do that. But even that it's not that costly.

Did you ever have accidents and what did your insurance cost look like?

Yeah, definitely it's something that we would have little. Mainly like an accident would be when two cars collided. And how that would happen is I talked about this German engineering and they developed these battery packs on each of the carts to control the Automatic braking. And they were so precise with it that they said, okay, well a cart's going to be on the track every for seven minutes or whatever. So this battery is going to last eight minutes and when it comes back around, it'll recharge. And so that's great until somebody is, you know, stops up there or whatever. So anyways, a low battery in that regard, you'll have people and it's like rubber to rubber, but it'll still shock you. So there's whiplash, I guess. There we did. This is public. We had a woman break her arm. It was a seatbelt issue where her seat belt. I'm not going to say who's at fault. But anyway, her seatbelt ended up where it's just like a car seatbelt, so it goes over the shoulder and through your lap. And she had.

She's a fault. She did it. She was an idiot.

Come on. And so anyways, she was on the heavier side and. And her, her body leaned one way and then through force and just I guess her muscles, she basically, she could not correct her body back up. And so anyway, she broke her arm and I feel terrible about that. There was. There's a period of time, just by pure coincidence, that ourselves, the original coaster, the Smoke Mountain Alpine coaster and one in Gatlinburg all had a very serious accident, like same week of each other. It was like July 4th weekend.

That was a bad week for the alpine industry.

It was terrible.

You call that Black Thursday?

Well, the news are just. You got all these reporters and anyways, it was a terrible time. Learned a lot about pr, a lot about safety and laws and stuff. But anyways, so that actually that period drove up everybody's insurance, I think. I can't speak to the other ones like one of them. From what I know, there was an employee after hours that kind of rode. Rode the coaster down like a surfboard.

How could you, Mom?

I agree. But. But anyways, he. He got hurt anyways. So maybe, I don't know the final payout insurance wise to each of these, but maybe call it a million dollars each on the high side. But rates went up, but they didn't like double. And so insurance is relatively very cheap in the beginning. Off the top of my head, I feel like we paid, I don't know, maybe 50, $60,000 for our first year.

Not bad at all.

Yeah, yeah, it went up. I don't know what it is now. There's so many that I would be. And there's so many more safety innovations that I Wouldn't be surprised if insurance was still pretty, pretty reasonable. Obviously people are opening them up and able to get insurance and, and all that. So yeah, that, that is a common question of. I'm sure insurance is crazy or whatever. And yeah, it's expensive, but I don't know, I don't think it's that bad.

Still a single digit percentage line item, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

What about your land lease cost and how long is the lease does? I imagine that's probably a pretty big barrier to entry, right? Finding the right topography and the right owner that's willing to do this.

Yeah, yeah. So with our situation, we, you know, in that area, and especially my dad and my grandparents, everything operated just very much handshake kind of deal. You have a rough price, you're not getting down to an exact dollar. And so anyways we, we had a handshake deal that we eventually got on, but I think it was $6,000 a month with no price increases and fairly good terms, all that kind of stuff. I think we got the better end of the deal on that. But ours leasing the land is fairly uncommon up there. I think a lot of people buy theirs. The good news about that is if you're confident on where you're putting it, more or less, this is really crappy land. Like it's.

You want it rough, you can't do much with it.

Exactly.

And how many acres are we talking?

We had, the guy had 10 or 12. And there was a parcel beside it that we as a group bought. It was five more acres. I think we paid 200,000 or so. And the like the first coaster, the Smoky Mountain Alpine coaster, they've got maybe 40 or 50 acres. It's the side of this mountain, beautiful, but you can't do much with it. And I think if I remember correctly looking up their records, maybe for all of that they paid 7 or $800,000, which don't get me wrong, is a lot of money, but is a steal for what they're doing. And yeah, there's that nice balance of a lot of this land. People can't think of another way to use it. And so it's relatively cheap.

Yeah, I mean I went on an alpine slide when I was on my church mission in Hungary. There was one in this city called Chopron S O P R O N. And it was like the missionaries would always go on it. It was the best and I think it was super cheap. And it wasn't even mountainous, it was just like a hill.

Interesting.

I don't Even know if you need mountains. Right.

And so. Oh, true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hill can work very well. And not even like, I obviously live in Tennessee. I live in Knoxville, which is about an hour away or whatever. I'm sitting here at my house and you can't see it, but we live on top of this hill. It's nothing crazy. It's like what you see everywhere and it wouldn't make sense, but I could put a coaster here in my neighborhood, load it at the bottom of the hill and it. This is perfect.

You've thought about it. You thought about it?

Yeah, definitely. It's just, again, it's a very efficient business. And so anyways, my point is there are so many places you could put it. I would be more hesitant about. Okay, what makes sense in terms of the demand. From what I know, a lot of the places in the US at least are either tourist spots, ski resorts, that kind of thing, which makes total sense. But I've got a theory that amusements, whether you're talking about snow or a coaster or whatever, if you're able to put one intelligently and just a normal city like here, Knoxville, I think it could actually do well. I don't think it has to be a tourist spot.

Yeah.

Do I want to gamble $10 million and find that out? Probably not, but I don't know. I might. I could be talked into taking that bet, I think, under the right circumstances, so. Well, yeah.

Let me know what you think of this idea. I've had this idea for a while, so. Yeah, you. You may have seen the tweet, but I. We did a 50 state tour as a family in our RV and we like in Arkansas. Arkansas is known for gem mining and you can find diamonds, you can find rubies, and that's. Kids love that.

Right?

Like any human on the planet has treasure hunting baked into their DNA. Right.

Of course.

So my kids. It was like a hundred degrees. I was like, all right, can we leave? But I paid 130 bucks or something. You pay like 15 bucks for a bucket. You pay 10 bucks for. It's just crazy. But that's what you do. And then we went to Alaska and we panned for gold.

The real. And I'm like, the real thing?

Yeah, we panned for gold and that was like 150 bucks. And then I thought, like, why is this stuff only in the middle of nowhere? And I thought, you know, you can. So I started looking like, where's the closest place you can pan for gold in to Texas? And it. You can do it in Colorado. Right. So what if you literally just brought dump trucks full of dirt from Arkansas to Dallas and dirt from Colorado to Dallas and you have a DFW area mining facility. It's just for kids. And you could do the authentic gold from Alaska or Colorado and authentic and it could just be all be in one place. Like don't you think that could work? There's. There's 9 million people here.

So we had. Or the landowner at the coaster p had gem mining there. It's a little bit one of those once you learn how the sausage is made kind of thing. It was like out back. Yeah. A bunch of dirt and sand and heat. You can buy.

They just put gems in there.

Right. But. But no people like another one. Very efficient to run. And you can even buy these setups. These gym mining setups that just cycle water. You have somebody overseeing. But very popular. There is a dedicated gem mining facility in the middle of Pigeonfield. Great location. So that has something to do with it. But they print. You are taking it in a more authentic way. And I have thought about. I have thought about not even like taking it that far. But it's such a good business. Even the way we do it in town, which is a little janky and I think it's ethical, but it's not. You're not getting real gold. And kids love it. You know one thing that I found with all these things. Adults love these things too.

Yes.

But they need an excuse to do it. And so it's like.

Yeah, if an adult does it by himself, he's a serial killer. If he does it with his kids and he's a good dad.

Yeah, exactly. And so we have at snow. Once we got open, I kind of transformed our gift shop and built this big candy store and just hundreds of different kinds of weird candy and this and that. And it does really well.

Yeah, I saw it. I was there.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And so obviously, yeah, kids love it. But the parents for themselves. That's our customer, believe it or not. Because it's just an easy excuse. They're not going to buy a. Some neon pink sour candy on a Monday back home or whatever. But they're in that setting and they still want to. Exactly. Exactly. And so whether it's candy or gym mining or whatever, I think. Yeah, I love those kinds of situations where like you're able to tap into the nostalgia element. Put a twist on it. Where like for me, indoor snow tubing. You might not have ever been to us or even seen a picture, but you can think about what that is in your head now, whatever you come up with in your head, odds are it's not going to look exactly like what I built. And so there's like this. There's this uniqueness. There's also familiarity that you pair it well together. And if you go too unique with something where you have to educate the customer, all that.

Too much friction.

It can work, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's somebody that's competing for the same customer in a different way. And so, yeah, like, you were so right. Gold and mining and all that, it's human nature. Yeah. I don't know. How old are you?

37.

I'm 37, too. So, anyways, you probably remember when that Gold Rush show first came out on Discovery.

Yeah, yeah, I watched it. That's why everyone's watching.

Everyone.

You go to NASCAR because you want to see Dale Earnhardt die.

Of course. Of course. And so it's something that. When that came out, like, yeah, I remember. And my dad has all this junk, heavy equipment that was fun when I was a kid. And now it's just the pain. But it's like, dad, let's take this and let's start digging. So. And it's just like this.

American pickers. Have you seen that?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, I can only speak being a male, there's something that resonates there. I think women would like that, too. I know kids do. And so anything I do, I try to really make sure I can do something that resonates in some way with the whole family. Young to old, all that kind of stuff. Well, speaking of, I think that's a great idea.

One of the. One of the things that went the most viral when Facebook Live and Instagram Live first came out were Asian women cracking open oysters. To find pearls like those would have thousands or millions of concurrent viewers. Cause it's like, is there a pearl? How big is the pearl? It's just.

That's incredible.

I think it's irrespective of gender. Like, we're all treasure hunters. We all want to see.

Of course, it's funny you said that. We actually. And you might have seen this before in our gift shop at Snow. Currently, we sell these kits. They're these toys. And it is like a clay, a hard clay. One looks like a diamond. One looks like a bar of gold. There's a couple others. And yeah, it comes with a little hammer, and you can open it. And on the back, it even says one in, I don't know, a Hundred actually have a piece of gold in it. And we sell those for 10 or $12, something like that. I think, I think we buy them for two, three, four dollars something. And yeah, they're really popular. And yeah, I always look at them, I was like, I'm gonna take one of those home. I haven't. But I see, I see the appeal, dude.

I mean, how's this idea? So I, I thought I tweeted a while ago about putting bull riding in the mall, right? Like an inflatable. And it was like, oh, insurance mall wouldn't. Yeah, there's a mall out there that would. Okay, I do want to test that. What if we took one of the gem mining kits and put it in a very high traffic, popular mall? Tell me that wouldn't work.

I totally agree. So when you said the bull riding thing, another like principle that I try to stand behind is like you've got to be able to have turnover efficiently and obviously as much as possible. And bull riding or something that's a very singular like one person at a time kind of thing. Obviously it can work, but something like gym, mining or coaster, snow, whatever, you know, you can have so many people going at once. And the idea is if you knock something out of the park, you can just keep like you've got endless supply. We all of the coasters ran into an issue where we had more demand than we did supply. We have, we did well, but we weren't the best one. But many days the line would be hour, hour and a half, two hours long. And I thought about, I did not end up doing this, but I thought about a couple years ago. Search Please tell me I have thought about that. Yeah, that's a different story. But purchasing one of the coasters existing business or building a new one and doing a second one beside it and whether they're dueling or you just have double the capacity if you were confident with the demand or if I had that original coaster that's still right there today, first thing I would do is put a second one there and like they instantly double their money, like instant and probably still have a line. And so de risk and a lot of cool stuff.

You're de risked. You already know the demand side.

Yeah. And so again, it's a good problem. But a coaster's problem is a turnover problem. We have turnover problems and bottlenecks when we get really busy at snow. And so I'm always thinking about, yeah, if you do something, how can you either satisfy as many customers if you're really popping off or you make up for it in other ways. Like it's a premium, people still want to do it but you know, you don't have as many customers at a time. And so where I'm going with that is, yeah, like the gym mining thing. And they're a lot like arcade games. Like, like surprisingly a lot of people don't know this, but all the arcade games that you see that Xbox in it or whatever, like literally the operator programs like you, you open it up, the computer asks you how much is the prize worth? And you say a thousand dollars. Say how much do you want to make on that? And you say I'd like to make 2000. And then you hit okay. And then literally, whether it's a crane game or whatever, it literally won't pay out until then. And so it's like if you have the demand, it is such a precise little business. And that's the same with gym mining where if you could work the numbers where like you imagine if you could have legit prizes, like they're not common but like a legit diamond, legit gold. And it's same thing, you work backwards. You say what can I afford? What margins? And then yeah, make like. I'm also a really big fan of like if you're going to do something like that, like how can you like 10x the experience or 10 times cheaper, 10 times more expensive or 10 times better rather than just this marginal little, we've got slightly more gold or whatever. Like it'd be awesome. Like the Mr. Beast model of anything he does, he just, he goes really big and it's this wow factor.

Yeah.

But yeah, no, love that. Big fan of malls too. I've always been interested in capitalizing on that even though they're on the decline. But I still think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm getting so many ideas as you talk. Like, okay, I'm just going to spit them all out. So I, yeah, I recently thought of the phrase illusion of saturation. Right. Where let's say you were able to find the next Dollywood, the next Pigeon Forge, and maybe there was one alpine slide, maybe none. You go in there, you open an alpine slide and you've got to line out the door. And then it's like, okay, then you go to your investors, you raise $100 million and you start planting different company branded alpine slides all over that area. It's not your same brand because you're not really benefiting from that, from having a chain in Fact, you might be even doing yourselves a, a disservice. Right. So you name them all differently, brand them a little differently. But the infrastructure is all the same from the outside looking in any potential competitors, like, oh man, there's like six under construction right now. Like, I'm not into it. Then you can still share the email list. You could still cross pollinate the lookalike audiences. Like, I just, I love that idea. I go to Texas Roadhouse or Chick or, or Cheesecake Factory and there's always a line. It's like, why don't you open another one next door or double your prices. It just pains me to see people walking away.

I totally agree. Especially with retail there's like this thing of like if you don't have a lot of people there, even if your product's good, like it, it somehow deters other people from going if your parking lot's empty or slow or whatever. And then it starts to go the other way where when there's more people there, it's like, oh well, I guess we have to go there. And then obviously like you also hit something where I'm sure, like take the coasters. When somebody says, oh my gosh, there's an hour long line, we are not going to do that. That's got to happen. But yeah, it's, it's this thing of like you said, like being able, however you do it through like multiple people, businesses, locations or the same. Yeah, like it's all about matching supply and demand in a way that balances out hopefully. And yeah, no, that's. It would take a lot about the coasters to do that. You'd need X number of locations scouted out. You'd want to secure that land, whether that's through options or a lease or whatever in a low risk way. You do have. In that instance, you do have a lead time of building it and ordering all that kind of stuff. And obviously you've got a large capital requirement. Yeah, I think it could definitely work. It would be a big, it'd be a grand slam. You would just. The planning is going to make or break you locations. Does this make sense? All that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I feel like manufacturing that much fake saturation, doing it in alpine slides might be like the riskiest, the most expensive way to do it, but you could take that same principle. Let's talk about a $2,000 bull riding thing in a mall like the galleria in Dallas. Four stories, 300,000 square feet and there's eight Starbucks in there. Right. So yeah, I Mean, like, I'm exaggerating, but it's so big that most people never make it to the whole mall. So you could do it there. You could put like a bull riding place at one entrance. Oh, this is crushing it. Let's put it at that entrance. Let's put it to that. You know what I'm saying? Like, you could do it a lot cheaper.

So a safer way of that. So I referenced this, the candy store that I added on. Incredible business. It is so good. High margins, very easy, all that kind of stuff. I have been very tempted at times to go somewhere else, Knoxville, wherever. And yeah, like, whether it's malls or whatever, like, why aren't there more candy stores? And that's the same kind of thing. Like in your instance in that mall, if you've got one that works. Yeah, just I don't know if it can handle 4 or 10 or whatever. But yeah, just like you keep doubling down on it. Once you know that you've got a winner and there's. If it works on one side of the mall, there's no reason why it's not going to work on the other side of the mall. Assuming they're equal in terms of band and stuff and. Yeah, no, that's. You called that the illusion of saturation, is that right? Yeah, yeah, I like that.

And it's like there's certain businesses that you only find in certain places, right? Like you see candy store in the tourist areas or in an airport, but like, why don't you ever see them in strip malls?

Or like. I, I, I totally.

Why can't you take a candy store? You know how sometimes you can buy candy like by the pound?

That's what we do. Yeah.

Why can't you take like a shrunk down version of that? Take like the 20% most popular items and sell that as a service to gas stations or something where it's like, listen, here's, here's the scale, here's the bags here, we're going to refill it. You don't do anything. People, they'll weigh, they'll check out and it's going to take 80 square feet and you can just put it like kind of like the, the Hunt Brothers pizza model at gas stations. Like candy or something.

Yeah. Incredible. Because candy is something that you've got so much room there to be creative and for our store and others that we obviously weren't the first to do something like that. It's about being bold and bright colors and bright lights and weird candy and all this so you can really, really do some very cool stuff. One thing I think I've had employees get worked up about, or other people. What if a customer steals some? Or what if they pour a bag and just leave it? Or whatever cost doing business.

Who cares?

Yeah, it doesn't.

I'm at. I'm at 80% margins. Like they stole 20%.

Yeah. I probably eat 10 handfuls of candy every time I'm at snow. Just that's what keeps me going. And so we are able to go through my addiction and still do very well. And yeah, it's just like it's so easy to run. It's cleanup is also very easy. And even if you design. If you're doing it by the pound, like you design systems that catch all the candy and keep it clean and everything we have. I don't know if this is in other areas, but we have general stores like kind of Old timey, whatever. There's a popular one here in Knoxville. And yeah, they do the same thing. They've got like these big barrels and I don't know, maybe 40, 50 different kinds of candy. A lot of older kind of candies. But yeah, it's like it looks great. People fill it up. The margins are incredible. Long shelf life. Almost. Everybody loves a good candy. Everyone's got a favorite in some way. And yeah, it's just like kids love it that once the kid's going crazy, that gives the. That gives the parent the excuse to also join in if they want to. Yeah. Love it. And you can take that same model to. Yeah. Whether it's gym mining or candy or whatever.

Yeah. I just. I love that gas station idea because the gas station owners probably buying sour patch kids for 2 bucks and selling it for 2.

89.

Like, listen, bro.

Yeah, yeah.

The kids are going to prefer this because they get to scoop it and they. It's experiential. And then you're going to have an 80% margin instead of a 20% margin.

Right. Yeah. And for them, like a gas station, obviously they're going to keep their existing candy selection. And yeah, if somebody wants just the Snickers bar for I don't know what they sell for now, 99 cents or whatever. Okay, you can do that or you can go over here and probably pay a little bit more. But you know, mix and match and that's the value that you there kind of breaking up. Okay. That, that the value of the experience, mixing and matching, getting the exact quantity.

That you want is five different things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. That's another. For whatever reason, at Snow, if I'm going to be working a station for whatever reason, it's usually the gift shop. And, man, that's another. You'll have somebody come up with just this monster bag of candy, and we weigh it. They can weigh it if they want to along the way, but no one ever does, but, you know, set it down and then tell them the price. And every time I wince at what it's like, okay, this is 89 of M&Ms. Or whatever. Nine times out of 10, the people pay it without even question. And then every once in a while, when somebody gets upset by it or whatever, I'll even say, okay, how about $40 then? And it's like, we're still making a great margin. They get a huge bag of candy, and almost everybody. Almost everybody finds a price to at least pay, if not a price. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

They have no concept of how much things weigh.

Oh, of course. And that's something too, that me working in the gift shop. We've got. We've got soft drinks and we've got what I call theater box candy. Just the prepackaged and I don't know, maybe a box of Sour Patch Kids. Let's call it $4, which is expensive. And maybe at a gas station by that same box for $2. And I've had a ton of people be like, oh, my God, I can buy this at the gas station for two. And then in a nice way, I usually say, okay, well, you can do it. And. And they aren't at a gas station, so they pay it. Or especially, like, with drinks and stuff. And they get it too. It's like, okay, it's a tourist town, you know, it's same as the movie theater. And so anyways, yeah, there's. Yeah. I just love those businesses or hustles or whatever that have usually high margins, very easy if you make mistakes or you price something wrong or you just didn't realize something, that there's a lot of room for error on your part. And. Yeah. And making. Doing a spin on something that is familiar with people, like candy, but doing it your own way with lights and weird gadgets. And we've got all different, like, stuff you've never seen before, like the hottest gummy bear and all these.

Or a snake that's like three feet long.

Exactly, exactly.

Or a gummy snake.

And. Yeah, yeah, we had those for a while. And the problem with those is. Yeah, when somebody. Like when somebody opens it or whatever, you've just got this, like, $60 gummy snake laying around they can't really do anything with. And it's more for.

It's a gimmick.

We have some of that stuff just as display. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, no it's. And it's just fun. Like it's just the fun. If you can get over selling sugar to people, that would be the only hurdle. And other than that, yeah, it's a fun, it's a fun little business and we do same with toys. We sell a lot of toys and like the weirder, the more crazy, the more unique, the better. And yeah. And so anyways it's a fun niche that I enjoy and want to build into more businesses as I go forward.

Yeah, I, I'm thinking about the, the gem mining in the mall and I love, I love what you said about putting like real prizes and 10% of those or whatever, like a real diamond. Imagine if like I just picture if an 8 year old kid is mining for gems and a family walks by, they're not going to stop and watch and then once they see the kid, they're not going to not buy. So like imagine manipulating a little bit where you're really busy. There are a bunch of kids and a kid checks out and you, you have a bag of dirt that's like tagged and you're like, here you go, try this one. That's the winning bag. And then all the kids see it and like, oh, I'm gonna get that result. Oh, 10% chance kids, but I'll take your money.

Oh totally. I, I didn't realize I have so many principles to business. But here's another one is I am really big on making everything also a spectator kind of event for Snow and the coaster too. Like there are a lot of people, whether they just aren't physically able or wanting to or whatever that just watch and making that experience something that's also good for them. Because like for us, and I promise this is going to loop back to the gold mine, but for us, like if there's a family and they brought grandma with them on vacation or whatever, you know, if grandma can't stand for an hour or two in line with you, like maybe you don't go to the coaster because it's like, right, we're not just going to sit or, you know, whatever. And so you've got to accommodate those kind of things as well. We at Snow, we've got these, you've probably seen them in the mall, but these massage chairs where you put in a dollar, whatever. And I was approached on those. And I was like, okay, whatever. It was a company going to do it, like a rev share. And I was like, whatever. You had nothing to lose. We got. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we got some. And they are probably the most profitable thing that we have in terms of a percentage. Like, it is crazy because again, like, it's grandma or it's the dad or whoever that's not participating, but, you know, it's their chance to do something, I guess, and we just keep adding them. And the only problem with that is it's a really unique. Well, I guess it's a really, like, clever product where if somebody sits down on it and doesn't pay within 60 seconds or whatever, it starts beeping like this big alarm or whatever to encourage them to pay. And so every once in a while you've got some chaos with the beeping and stuff. But it's effective. They. Most people pay and we start at, I don't know, two or three dollars and go all the way up to $20 for those massages. And it freaking prints. And so that ties back to. That's something that allows somebody that might not be participating in the main activity to still come and do something that they enjoyed and watch the others. And like, with the gym mining too, I would really, really focus on, like, how does this look from either somebody in the group that might not be participating or how does this look from somebody walking, like the mall, Somebody just walking. And how do you get their attention? And. And you said this, like friction. Like, how do you reduce the friction and allow them to participate as easily as possible? Like maybe that's. Even you've got like some free bags or something and they're smaller, whatever. And you hook them in with that and upsell just something to. Yeah. To get them to participate and. Yeah. Make it like a. Maybe not a show, but an experience.

Yeah. Well, I just interviewed the owner of Dig World, that guy who has the.

I'm so excited.

It's coming out in a week or two. But he does the same thing. I'm like, how is it only $25 for two hours? And he's like, well, it's like that includes the grandma that's just watching.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then grandma usually gets on the backhoe as well. Right. So that's exactly what you're talking about. I was thinking with the massage chairs, you should reprogram the beeps to just yell like, poor, poor, poor. They're not paying. They're not paying.

That's Funny, you know, it's. It's something that when my rev share, when that lease or whatever started being close to expiring, I was like, okay, well, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go buy my own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I told that. I was like, hey, look, like I feel bad about this, but like, I'm gonna do this and I appreciate it. And they were like, they gave me some stat. Like we were like the number three vendor for them. They had a lot of locations or put them in a lot of locations. And anyways, they cut my rev share down to. I think it's like 80, 20.

They'd rather have something than nothing.

Yeah, they supply like new cushions if something breaks. But I was like, fine, okay, we'll keep going for a while. But oh yeah, what I was going to say about the, the dig world, I'm sure you saw this in Pigeon Forge. We just got Digging Zone. It's same thing, but it's an independent brand or whatever. Did you see that? No.

I want to like, I want to do a whole other podcast with you about that, if you don't mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I was going to say is one reason I'm really excited to hear yours that you just did was a. You know, I know ideas are dime a dozen, but I've been thinking about doing that forever. I just never.

Well, you're the guy to do it too. I mean, that's right up your alley.

I know, I know, but so here's the thing. The one here is in what I would say a terrible location. I could be wrong, but I think it's a terrible location. You need a lot of land and land is at a premium. And so they are off the beaten path. So they have to be a destination for the most part. So in what you save by not being in a premium real estate, like whatever that would cost, you're paying it every year in marketing. You gotta get people there. But anyways, they. I watched them very closely. They. It appears that they might have ran out of money a couple times as they were building it. And they finally got open and there's a huge buzz around it on social media and everything. And so I was really excited to see, okay, what do you get? And they sell a all day pass and don't quote me on this, but I think adults for the day, it's like $70, something like that. Every person has to pay to enter. Grandma's paying that $70.

Holy cow.

Yeah, I think there's a little Bit of a discount for senior citizens or kids or whatever, but I don't pass that way in town when I'm up there. Super, super often. I think they've got some business I'll be very interested to see. Like, I mean, if they're able to do it for 60 or $70 off the beaten path. And like when you really look at it, like, I don't know, a lot of the rides are like, you could jazz them up quite a bit. They've got the trackhoe or whatever that more people sit and goes like that. I don't know, you can definitely jazz that up, but. And you can definitely, I think, go cheaper depending on how you pay for the equipment. But anyways, I've been super interested in that. I still am thinking about maybe doing one in a better location, put my own spin on it. People love digging and moving things, all that kind of stuff with heavy equipment. And at theirs, from what I've seen, they've got a little sandbox or whatever. But what if you could like really dig some holes like in a safe way and really fill and push dirt and do some fun stuff?

It just, you could get really fun. Yeah.

Oh, oh, totally. So I will be very excited to hear how what you said. $12 an hour? 14.

Yeah, it's $25 for two hours per person.

Okay. That's not bad. Yeah, that's not bad at all. And yeah, I'll be very excited about that because it's been on my mind a lot.

Yeah. And he's only on three acres. 50,000 customers a year.

Oh, no way. What city?

Katy, Texas. It's right next to the mall there. It's like in the mall parking lot. So he leases land from the mall.

Oh, no way.

It's brilliant.

And going back to malls. I'm so glad you brought that up. I have. Thought so. So here in Knoxville we've got a couple malls, but the main one's called West Town Mall and it's got a Cheesecake Factory that tells you like, it's not big, but it's also, it's got movie theater, all that kind of stuff. But their parking lot is humongous and they. A couple times a year. I don't know if this is common in other places, but they'll lease it out to a circus or whatever it is and they'll have a pop up event for a month or something. I think it does well. But I thought about doing something very similar with a snow concept and leasing a space like that that has high traffic that has a lot of area do it seasonally. It's a whole lot easier to maintain snow and November, December, January than it is July. And yeah, do. Do a pop up snow event. I have no idea. I have no idea what, you know, leasing a mall parking lot would look like. But people do it so I think there's something there. But yeah, I, I think about malls a lot actually. I never go. But yeah, like it's just. They're really just unique in a weird, just perfectly American kind of invention.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's just so funny. Yeah.

And especially in Houston, like being indoors to shop is. That's always going to be popular, right?

In certain markets, of course. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. And well, that's something too. Like I assume you're saying that Texas, I'm sure gets very hot and whether it's extreme heat or it's cold or it's snow or whatever, people might say they enjoy that. They enjoy being outside, they enjoy being the sun. But most people, they enjoy small segments of that. And so we'll have a lot of people that come from up north and have snow all the time and they are excited to be at our place because it's a controlled environment. They've never been in. Snow in 70 degrees. It makes it just so accessible in a way that you know. And so like same thing like shopping. If it's Houston in the summer, yeah, you might enjoy outside sometimes. But yeah, people are lazy and want to be comfortable and yeah, like being indoors or just. Yeah, I get. I guess where I'm going with it is just like bringing. It's not to cater to the laziness of the customer, but it's just making them. Reducing the friction, just like you said.

Yeah, well, dude, like I'm. I feel like we only scratched the surface of what I want to talk to you about. Like, I would love to have you on again.

I can do this all day if you don't mind. Yeah. Oh, I, I would love to.

I think this is going to be really popular because it was just chock full of ideas.

I, I hope so. I don't care that much necessarily about having a following, but I just like talking shop, I guess. And one thing that's hard for me in terms of I'm traditionally been very bad on self promotion, but I can't really sum up what it is that I do. And like you can do a deep dive whether it's. I mean there's plenty of projects and businesses we didn't even mention and it's just something that it's hard to package it and we talk, whatever, an hour and. Yeah, like I could seriously go another few hours with you and it's just a hard thing to explain. So anyways, having a. Having multiple sessions, I think would be awesome.

Yeah. Okay, well, let's do it. I'm headed to Greece in a couple days.

Oh, cool.

And then Utah. But I'm bringing my recording stuff to Utah, so maybe in two or three weeks.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, just let me know with. With a little bit of heads up. I can make anything work, really, for the most part. So. Yeah, just let me know what works for you.

Okay. Awesome, man. Well, like, this is a lot of fun. I feel like you're we're kindred spirit.

I agree. I agree.

You posted that picture of something you're building and I want to get to that and I want to talk more about snow and.

Okay.

I just. Because I feel like you're doing like 80% more than what we got had time for today, so.

Oh, totally. So, yeah, no, I'll. I'll get some topics together too. But yeah, just whatever you think of. And yeah, if you want to do a shorter session, longer session, whatever, just let me know. I'm pretty flexible.

Cool. All right, well, thanks a lot, man. It was great meeting you.

Okay. See you, brother.

See you. All right. What'd you think? Did I oversell it? I didn't oversell it. Matthew is awesome. Please let me know Chrisofounders.com if you want me to have him on again. Please like and subscribe. Share this with your friends. Yada, yada, yada. I hope you got some good ideas of how you can start a candy business or a gem mining business or an alpine roller coaster, an indoor sledding business. Whatever you want. Hope you enjoyed it. Love you.

Bye.