In this YouTube episode, the host—creator of the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast—shares his personal hobby of scouting businesses for sale and presents the six most compelling opportunities he examined in 2023. He begins by introducing his passion for business analysis and the podcast’s methodology of reviewing thousands of listings each year. He then walks through each deal: 1. A unique pizza‑boat restaurant in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, priced at $425K with $500K‑$1M revenue and $250K‑$500K profit, highlighted for its exclusive mooring license and hurricane risk. 2. A Northern California worm farm (Nationally Acclaimed Worm Farm) selling soils, worms, and castings, listed at 1× earnings, noted for its cheap price, strong demand from gardeners, and ties to the rise and fall of California’s marijuana industry. 3. A 9‑year‑old niche SaaS email‑capture platform generating $1.3M revenue and $100K income, offered at 2‑3× earnings but shrinking 3% monthly, illustrating the danger of declining software businesses. 4. Powder King Mountain Resort in Mackenzie, BC, listed for $8.3M with a 50‑room hostel, dining, and cabins; the host admires the dream of owning a remote ski resort but flags the lack of profit data. 5. A Florida fireworks retail/wholesale store, asking $4.2M, cash‑flowing $900K on $2M revenue, with the host leveraging his 70‑year family experience in fireworks to explain market nuances. 6. A college‑focused tent‑rental company, asking $5M for $500K cash flow on $3M revenue, praised for its differentiated niche but critiqued for seasonality and a high price multiple. Throughout, he interjects personal anecdotes, co‑host Heather’s input, and occasional risk assessments (hurricanes, market decline, lack of P&L). He ends by inviting viewers to comment on their favorite deal.
Chapters
Alright, so some people are into all kinds of different stuff. Me personally, I am a business nerd. Like, I love talking about business. I love thinking about business. I love talking with other people about business. All that's super fun to me. And like, one of my hobbies is looking at and talking about businesses for sale and thinking about opportunities around them to make money. So in fact, I even go above and beyond all that. I have a podcast where we look at businesses for sale every week. It's called Acquisitions Anonymous, and I'll look at thousands of businesses per year, and then we'll talk about them on the podcast, and then we publish it and it gets a lot of listeners and all that kind of stuff. So This video is me going through and showing you the 6 most interesting businesses that I looked at in 2023. Okay, so here's business number 1. It is one of the most unique restaurants I've ever seen in my whole life, and it's kind of a weird restaurant. These guys decided after they left MIT that what they were gonna do is move down to the US Virgin Islands and start a pizza boat. And basically the pizza boat has all of this like stuff you would need to make high-end pizza. And then they have little tender boats that like go around and like deliver the pizzas to other boats. So we reviewed this deal, it's super interesting, and it's the number one TripAdvisor-rated restaurant in the St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands for sale. And they asked $425,000 for it with revenue somewhere between $500K and $1 million a year, and they would profit $250,000 to $500,000 per year. So just kind of crazy, crazy numbers. Now there's the mild kind of thing you need to think about with regards to like the hurricane risk. Bill hinted and found something here in the listing that makes this business like super interesting, which is there limited number of moorings of where you can actually put these boats. And once you have the license to be the only pizza boat in this cove, things can get pretty good because nobody else can come in and sell pizza. Well, unless they want to like fly it in from Domino's in Miami or something like that, uh, and it creates a really interesting dynamic to where there's something to buy here that's very different than kind of your local neighborhood pizza joint. Okay, deal number 2 that we looked at, and one of the coolest businesses I've seen in a while. It is actually the first business I ever looked at that was for sale that in a involves a worm with a top hat on it, and it's because it is a worm farm located in Northern California. And this one was called Nationally Acclaimed Worm Farm, selling soils, worms, and casting. A business that is a good business, that's somewhat defensible and predictable, that sells for 1x earnings basically means like you get all your money back in a year. And like, that's a really good deal. Businesses will often trade for 4 or 5 times. And so that's why when we're looking at this deal, we're all like, what the heck is going on here? Like, this is a heck of a deal. So as we dig into this, we discover this worm farm is actually a really interesting business. So Heather shares— who's one of the co-hosts— she shares that the people who are gardeners and stuff like that, they love the soil that comes out of these worm farms because it's just like super rich for backyard gardeners. So she actually shares she has bought worms and the dirt that comes with the worms like off the internet. I have, I have purchased worms for my garden and I think they probably came from— because it had a funky logo on it, you know, that I thought was pretty funny. And the prices are unbelievably expensive. Like you're spending $80, $100, $250 to get like packages of live worms delivered to you that you put in your backyard. And we couldn't really figure out why this business was so cheap. But one thing we noticed as we dug through this one, which is super interesting, is there's not a lot of history about how the business has done over the years. And after we talked about this one on the podcast, it became really interesting to learn that this business was hugely a benefit from the growth and then decline of the marijuana industry, uh, in California over the past decade. So this next business that was extremely interesting was a 9-year-old software business that basically was trading for a really low price, like 2 times, 2 times earnings is what these guys had listed it for. And so what the business actually did was, if you ever see those systems that like pop up on a website and do like email capture and all that kind of stuff, like this was a niche piece of software that was used to do that and was plugged in a lot of websites, and those websites would pay per month to use this software. But as we dug into it, we discovered this business was shrinking like crazy, like shrinking like 3% a month. When you see a software business like this shrinking, like, you know, it's gonna keep shrinking and your life is gonna get really, really hard going forward. But I think what was super cool about this is like, here's a business that if you look at it in a software industry kind of standpoint, it's really, really cheap. This business is doing $1.3 million in revenue, 900 $100,000 in income and they want to sell it for 3 times earnings for software. Like, amazing. Like, super cheap deal when this stuff in software will often trade for 4, 5, 10, 15 times earnings, especially if the business is growing. You know, to me, this was really incredibly interesting because, uh, it's easy to think like a whole industry should be priced a certain way, and then when you get into it, you realize, oh, like, this business is a melting ice cube and I'm just buying myself a lot of heartache. All right, let's talk about this next business that I loved looking at. It is the Powder King Mountain Resort that was for sale up in a place called Mackenzie, British Columbia. It's selling for $8.3 million. So the first thing we realized was, oh, it'd be awesome to own a ski resort, except for the fact this one is out in the middle of nowhere. So the cool thing about the Powder King Mountain Resort, they have a 50-room hostel-style hotel, dining room, lodging, day-use cafeteria, cabins and all this stuff. Very old, you know, style resort stuff. And it just created this like cool dream for me to think about like, oh, I wish I was like stupid rich because I would go buy like a Powder King Mountain Resort and turn it into my personal resort out of the middle of nowhere. And like, you look at a business like this and I think it's, it's really interesting at first, but then you start to realize, oh, there's a reason this thing hasn't been able to make any money. And ultimately, like, I liked looking at the business, number one, for dreaming's sake. But second of all, like, you can see a business like this and again, it comes back to kind of this idea of creatively repurposing stuff and it can be so powerful. And to me, when I saw this, it made me realize you make a dust destination resort for people like, like the Yellowstone Club and stuff like that. But also a red flag on this one, they didn't show us any profit and loss, which generally means probably the business isn't making any money. But man, like, I just love looking at this one because it's just so, so beautiful. Business number 5, uh, that I loved looking at this year was a fireworks store for sale on the west coast of Florida. So basically it's a retail and slightly wholesale fireworks store. So retail being like your average Joe walks in and buys fireworks from you, uh, just like they walk into Walgreens or a CVS or something like that, except instead of like drugs and candy, it's, uh, well, fireworks and explosives, right? Um, so they were asking $4.2 million for this business. It cash flows $900,000, gross revenue of a little over $2 million, $200,000 worth of inventory, taxes, and some furnitures and equipment, and a rented space. And it's been around since 2003. So, you know, it's a standard kind of retail shop, uh, that is there in Florida and seemingly doing pretty well. So they sell sparklers and Roman candles and backyard kind of fireworks to people. And the one thing I loved about looking at this business was like, this is one of the rare kind of businesses where the owners prepare like a little video for you and like hype you up about it. So I'll play a bit of it here. The fireworks distribution company and store for sale. The business operates throughout the state of Florida. And look, I think what was really interesting when I dug into this business is it reminded me how much when you are somebody that knows a lot about a market, how much inside information you have and how important it is when you're looking at buying a business in an industry to understand what you do know and what you don't know. And I proceeded over the next 30 minutes of this episode to like give a masterclass on how fireworks work because I've owned a fireworks business and my family's been in it for 70 years. So I know a lot about the whole market and all the nuanced stuff. I will tell you from personal experience, owning a fireworks store, if you want to maximize for being an interesting person at a cocktail party, like it is a super fun life to have because, you know, I'm involved in all kinds of different business stuff, a dozen companies now. And like, it's a situation where nobody ever wants to hear about the stuff that's, you know, to me, like much more challenging. They all want to understand the fireworks business. So like, this was a beautiful one just because I knew whoever buys it, will be somebody that's just like the hit of the party. All right. So this business, $5 million asking price, $3 million in revenue, $600,000 in cash flow. It is a really unique niche business like that I liked a lot, which is it's a tent rental business. So you like rent tents to people, but it specifically focuses on a very unique customer niche, which is renting tents to colleges. Right. And what I loved about that was the type of customer that you get with a college is really interested in a couple of things. Number one, you're somebody who's trying to rent tents to impress parents, visiting dignitaries, all that kind of stuff. You want to pay for quality and high experience, which to me, when I see stuff like that, it's like, cool, I'm going to get some margin from this whole thing. And I think it showed in the numbers that these people have, right? Like they're doing, they're doing $3 million in revenue, but they end up for a rental business generating a lot of cash flow. The downside of this business, as we looked at the listing, is kind of what you imagine, right? It's seasonal. You're dealing with somewhat fickle customers. It's not recurring revenue. So there's some downside amongst that, but that's what you kind of see often in every rental business. And so that's, you know, you can get past that. And of course, the thing I hated the most about this business was the asking price— $5 million for $500,000 in cash flow. Like, beyond the asking price, like, this is a great business to be in, just like a super fun business to think about. And it always because like rental is usually an okay business to be in, but what you want to watch out for in rental is like replacements or how many direct competitors do you have that can do what you do. And because these guys specialize just in renting to local colleges and universities, like that creates a hugely differentiated market for them that I love. So that was it. So those were the top 6 businesses that I looked at this year, and I love showing them to you, and hopefully you enjoyed it as well. Tell me which one was your favorite in the comments below, and I'll see you next time.
