8 Fitness Acquisitions E: 31 Matt Fischer, Opened 10th Location Top M&A Entrepreneur

Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. My guest today is Matt Fisher. I met Matt on a mastermind call Patch Baker's mastermind call. So, uh, welcome Matt. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so on that uh Patch Baker call, I heard that you have done 8 acquisitions, and you're on your 10th. Uh, location. So can you tell me exactly what that is and tell me a little bit a lot more about that? Yeah, um, so it's the 8th acquisition we've done in the fitness, uh, space, kind of the gym, health club space. I, I've done other acquisitions in other industries before. I've been kind of a serial entrepreneur since I was a kid. And then, you know, as I got older, um, got more sophisticated and, and actually I think I probably got Um, More stubborn how I wanted to approach life. Um, you know, several years ago we got involved in the fitness business through a, through a retail company that we had that was selling, you know, the actual equipment to homes and to commercial places and then as part of that. We started at a small gym in a small city in the Midwest where we're located. And it kind of took off pretty fast, and I had this idea that You know, it's almost like a fast-based model to have a fitness facility if you deliver the right customer service, and the money keeps coming back every month. So I had this idea that, you know, to scale this, we probably need to have 10 of these clubs. And I started the process of going out and looking for You know, and taking advantage of of some advice my uncle gave me a long time ago, which was, you know, it's always easier to build the business that started versus trying to start it from scratch. So I went out looking for Gyms and gym owners uh that wanted to sell but I had this hypothesis that they were a lot like. Bars, gyms and bars for guys. They all wanna own one until they get involved and they figure out how much work it really is. That's true. So they wanna get out and I found, I found people that were, you know, groups of folks and people that were motivated, and we just started acquiring clubs at a pretty rapid pace. Over the last several years. Yeah, so let me, let me go back to the, you said you've done acquisitions before the fitness space. What, what, what were the, let me go even further back. Uh, now, is it your dad that suggested this? It's like instead of starting a business with 0. How's my uncle. Oh was your uncle, your uncle, OK, well, he was uh. He was a pretty successful entrepreneur in uh northern Wisconsin. He had a construction company and a software company, and he honestly made his money in waste management, picking up trash. So construction software, waste management. Yeah, OK, so it didn't matter what industry to him. It was just the financials had to look good and it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and he, and he understood. I mean, he had some restaurants and stuff, but honestly, those were more passion projects for him that didn't do real well. But he made his money when he sold, you know, he sold his uh waste management company, and then he had this idea for a software software product that would help companies optimize their, their routes for picking up trash, and he ended up selling both of those for, you know, tons of money. And then I got into a couple other businesses. Yeah. So he had this big influence on you to say, hey, you know, you can go work for a company, 9 to 5, whatever that was, or you can buy, you know, start a company, it'll fail, or you can buy a company that's already flying in midair, and then just improve it from there. Yeah, you bet. Yeah, it was um it was something that's kind of stuck in my stuck in my head ever since I was a child. I mean he was. Uh, he probably gave me that advice when I was up there spending summers with my grandfather playing golf at at 1314 years old. And that's what, you know, it's kind of what he was doing as an individual. Um, you know, and I, I did the 9 to 5 job and I've had consulting gigs and uh my career was basically focused in. Helping healthcare organizations, the largest providers in the country, look at their business and help them increase margins and, and productivity and efficiencies whether it was in the front office side or in the, in the back office ERP side. Yeah. So what did, I mean, what was the first, let me go back to your uncle because this is always good. I mean, I don't know if you've ever read this, uh, Joseph Campbell, uh, that hero with the 1000 Faces. There's always an art to a story where ordinary world and you have this call to adventure, and then you have, you know, this meeting the mentor and obviously your uncle's the mentor. I mean, did you spend a lot of time with him just asking him questions like how to do this, what to do, or did you just say, hey, Just like, you know, don't do this, do this, and then, no, I did honestly he, he didn't, he wasn't much of a sharer. He, he was a wonderful human being. I mean, he was a great guy, um. You know, uh, we weren't super close, but I always, I always kind of watched from, you know, kind of behind the scenes and how he was approaching his different business challenges and the way he, the way he approached life. And said, someday I want to be in a spot where I can, you know, I could go do what I wanna do when I wanna do it. And, and the only way, if I looked at the people that I was surrounding myself, and the only way I was gonna do that was to go. You know, build a business and buy real estate or do both or go, go be independent and You know, and try and try to be that, try to live that life. Yeah, and did you have your very first acquisition, did you have uh a partner with you, a couple partners, or you just do it by yourself? No, so, um, I had a, I had a longtime friend that was a part when we made our first acquisition, which was a, a, um, foreclosure company that went out and managed, managed real estate for the large banks that had foreclosures and our job was to go make sure that they're being properly taken care of. So we had a crew of people. We had about 5 or 6 different banks and our responsibility was to go out, make sure they weren't becoming dilapidated, you know, taking the, you know, cleaning them out, getting them ready for resale. And then eventually we got into, you know, actually property management. We're part of another company as part of that to do property management along with our own real estate of managing other people's rental properties, whether it be commercial or residential rental properties. Yeah. And that, that we, we, uh, like any partnership once in a while you get two different directions you want to go in like, you know, he's a longtime friend decided that he wanted to go into. Into the restaurant business, which I've never wanted to be involved in the restaurant business. The failure rate is so high. Yeah, yeah, and he um He was part of the first gym that we opened, and then he decided he just wanted out so he uh we he left and went, took his money and went and started a restaurant with somebody else and I'm still in, I'm still in the entrepreneur game and he's a full-time electrician again. Yeah, does he uh does he all still own part of that first one, or did you? No. No, no, no, he, uh, he walked away completely. Completely. Yeah. How did that first acquisition, what did it look like? Was it a a money making profitable operation? Yeah, it was. We actually made money. Um, we didn't, you know, it was enough for him cause he was working full time. Uh, I was still working kind of a consulting gig. It was enough for him to step away and I could manage, manage it, you know, on the side as a it's kind of a side hustle for me. Um, it grew pretty fast. We had a number of properties and the property management thing came along. Yeah, I mean, it made money. It, it's just not, you know, when, when we looked at the business and he looked at the business, because he had this very clear set of how he, like he, he said to me at one point in time, he said, listen, if I could do this, it would make me so happy. And so we went out and tried to do that, and we did that and then he got there and we were like, holy shit, this is not what we thought it was. Uh, this is not fun. Um, it's a difficult game, it's, it's hard. Um, and it required us to really work in the business and not, you know, not above the above it, right, and you really had to be in it, um, and by in it I mean we were in it. So did you, how did you solve that because you can't acquire 8 other 7 other stuffs working in the business. Um, well, ultimately ended up selling it off, so we, we. You know, he left and then I sold, I sold it off to somebody else. Oh, OK, so that was a pretty good first, you know, lesson that you bought with a partner. Partnership didn't work out, in the business, not what you want to do, sell it off and you go, OK, how do I recreate this story for the next time? What does it look like? Yeah, and you know, at the same time as I was, as we had that business, we had a a retail that retail fitness business kind of as well that we that I was running and managing along with my wife. And, you know, one of the things that became very clear very quickly for us was, If I wasn't there or she wasn't there in the actual physical business of a brick and mortar store, we didn't make any money. I mean, we could hire all the employees in the world, they could be great employees, they would show up for work, but at the end of the day, their paycheck was only dependent upon them showing up. I mean, they would get commissions, but they didn't care whether or not we paid the bills, um, and so I needed to find a way or I wanted to find a way. To build a business that did not depend upon me. And in fact, when we tried to sell the retail fitness business, the first question everybody asked me was, if you leave, you're out of here, does it make money? And I had to answer that honestly, no, it doesn't. I'm not here, my wife's not here. You need to be here. It's a full time. Nobody wants to buy a job. I mean, to be honest, there are people that want to do that, but there's another part that just said I don't, I just don't wanna buy a job. Yeah, um. A job that, you know, you can't get fired from, you can't quit from. You know, you gotta do it. Uh, it was a great business. It was fun, but it, you know, we were working weekends, we were working nights, we're working holidays. I can't tell you how many family, you know, holiday events I, I missed because I had to work the day at Thanksgiving for, you know, Black Friday. Because somebody didn't show up cause I gotta go into a concert or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, or so never sick days and, you know, um. It just, it just needed to be. I wanted to find something. I wanted to find something where I didn't need to be there and the business didn't really rely on me, and it became quickly apparent at the at the first gym that we built and owned, I didn't need to be there. I mean, I think the only reason I needed to be there, somebody needed to be there was to sign people up, and if I could solve that problem, I never, I, I needed to hire somebody to clean the business, and my job was just to go out and, you know, to grow it. Was it, is it like a fitness business where you just have a pass card and you open the door? Oh, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, we only have one location that's not 24/7. Um, and we just logistically couldn't do it because it's 40,000 square feet and it's got multiple entrances into a pool. And, uh, we couldn't figure out a way to lock the pool down after hours to keep people in there at 2 o'clock in the morning, you know, drinking and smoking and doing what they do in a college town. Yeah. How, how did you tune into that business model? I mean, is it just a process of elimination that didn't work and just say, God, the only way we're gonna get this sass type. I'm not in the business type, you know, business model. No, I, I tried to buy a bunch of anytime fitnesses first. And uh I quickly got underneath the covers of Anytime Fitnesses and just figured out. Man, this is a, they really want you for everything. I mean, it was there was a fee for waking up in the morning, it seemed like, and, you know, they had tons of revenue, but at the end of the day, they weren't making a lot of money, and they, they weren't hard things, you know, charging for cameras, they charge you for access fee, they charge you for using their billing system and I just felt like I can't be that complicated to go do this on my own. And put the pieces of the technology together cause that was kind of my background, to put it together and and create it and uh. You know, um, we've, I figured it out for the first one and then slowly over the last 2020, almost 22, so the last seven or eight years, we've, uh, we've kind of perfected how we do that now and what that model looks like. So, you know, I have a I don't need a lot of staff. We keep it clean. We have a lot of trainers, um, but the anytime is a, sorry, the anytime is a, that's a franchise, right? Yeah, that's a franchise, yep. Yeah, I don't think they're not out here in Arizona, but there's Choose Fitness, C H U Z E. Yeah, so they're like anytime, uh Snap Fitness, um there's a couple other ones, but they're basically small footprint, smaller footprint, um no hardly any staff, and you can be there 24/7. You can be there anytime, right? Um, they're based out of Minneapolis. They've got, they used to have thousands of locations, but they're slowly, you know, that curve is coming down. So that, that, that acquisition didn't work out because I didn't really like the franchise model, just didn't feel right to me, so I went out and started our own brand, uh created our own kind of back office operations, and then just started acquiring facilities and then we, you know, in the last few years and I wouldn't say we've perfected, but if we find a target, you know, we really know we really now have a process of bringing those people into our, into our business model. Yeah, so were you uh acquiring locations that were already gyms that, you know, a lot of the in Yeah, so I took the advice, yeah, I took the advice from my uncle when I was, I was, I, I mean, I literally was out there cold calling, cold calling gyms. I mean it was odd cold call, hey, where's your, can I talk to your owner and get the owner on the phone and say, hey, this is going on, this is what I'm doing. I'm trying to get to 10. I'd like to buy a gym, what do you think? I was just as simple as that. I would say out of every 10 clubs I call, I get 1 person who wanna have the conversation. 1 out of 10, 10%. Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, and sometimes you, you know, you fall into things, we fall into a couple of them. Um, at this latest acquisition is that's not really even an acquisition, cause we're not, we didn't spend any money getting it, um. We worked our way into the, uh, to the landowner who had any oddly it wasn't anytime Fitness that, that closed and it was sitting there empty and um he needed somebody in there to rent the space. So he basically gave me the equipment if I agreed to a certain rent price and committed to a 3-year deal. So we're we're walking in, open the temp location and got the rent our fixed expenses to the point where we don't need a ton of members to be successful there. And it's a satellite location for one of our larger gyms on the Illinois side. Um, so, you're out, you're, you're expanded from Iowa to Illinois. Yeah, yeah, we have about half of our businesses in Illinois and half of it's in Iowa. Wow, yeah. And do you have to, when you first get out there, you look at it and you say, hey, well, uh, you, you, how do you tell me about the, there's KPIs and there's critical drivers, right? So how many people is it per, you know, square foot that you need to get in there or what? It's. Simple math, I mean, it's, it's, here's our here's our fixed expenses. I don't really count variable because we can control that. Excuse me, my fix that, honestly, it's red. That's it's rent and if we have equipment payments divided by divided by our by our purchase price or our membership price, and that's my target, right? So is it normally you, you look in there and you say, hey, this is, you know, I got a bench here, I got a lap machine here, I got pull up machine. I got a squat machine. I got all. This stuff here, but I need this to, to fill out that I got to go buy it or, or do you guys? Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's sometimes we augment, we have to augment a few pieces here and there. But if I, you know, if I'm were to build from scratch, you know, I was gonna spend a half million dollars on equipment to outfit a large facility, I would take that lease payment plus our rent payment or our mortgage payment in some cases and divide that by our membership costs and go, this is how many members I need to break even. And this is our goal. I need this many, many members to make it worthwhile, and can, can we achieve that based on the population that's around us? Yeah. When you go back to uh negotiate the lease uh with the landlord, do you have a lot of uh Uh, power in that sometimes when you go, hey, look, there's nobody in here. I want this, or do they just say, here's the, here's the, the bottom price. Yeah, I'd say it's a motivated, um, certainly have to have a motivated landowner for sure. Um, we have You know, and I'm very transparent up front with the landowner when we're negotiating the lease, uh, and I, and I, this has to make money for me. Not just for you as a landowner. I don't want you to lose money, but it has to make money for me and I, you know, the fitness business obviously has been challenged although I think it's gonna continue to grow going forward at a pretty decent rate, uh, probably, you know, more than people expect, but It has to make money for me from day one, and, and I'm super transparent about that, and I'm very clear about this is my, and I, I break down the number just like I did for you. I need this many members to break even, uh, based on this rent price, and if I can achieve that, we'll both live, you know, be happy campers. Does that work for you? But if it does, then let's continue the conversation. If it doesn't, no harm, no foul, I'll go find a different place. So you, I mean, you pretty much open the books and show them, here's, you know, what I've done in these other locations. What happens if you don't get to the, like, you, you say, this is what I need to break even, but if I don't get there, this is what happens. Cause before the lease or after? Well, I guess before and after because they kind of wanna know what's happening, right? Well, I, I won't sign a lease if I don't think I can get the break even. I mean, I just, I just, I'll walk away, and we've done that, we've walked away, we've We've entered negotiations thinking super excited about, you know, adding a location and The landlord, you know, is at $30 a square foot and I need to be at $10. Uh, and it doesn't work. And then, you know, it's just, it's just business, um, but we get there, we get there pretty fast because that's, I don't want a lease. I don't want to drag out and order a bunch of equipment and then have a lease and not be happy about it. So I always solve the lease issue first and then worry about, you know, equipment and stuff like that afterwards. So when you do, I, I gotta believe at this point in any, you know, renting some, uh, you know, property out there has got to be in your favor at the moment, the leverage. Yeah, um. Yeah, I mean, You know, it, and it's also the bigger the space and the more it's built out to be a gym, the more it is, the better it is for me because it's, it's difficult, you know, like we're in a, in a situation in our, our largest club in, uh, in Iowa. Where the the owner is a capital investment group. And they want to sell the space to us. And they want this ridiculous price, and this one, you know, start this start this process has started a year ago, and it would be hugely advantaged and advantageous for us to purchase the building. Uh, it lowers our overall commitment, you know, we get some, obviously some equity in the property. We have to take out some partners that. They, they are, they're in love with the space because I'm a great runner, so they, they talk about this cap rate and how great of an investment it is for me because I'll get all the write-offs and depreciation, and I, I just candidly said so per single use building at this point. Yeah, if I, but your lease is static, right? It's, well, it goes up every year variable like if you go to a mall, they'll charge you a percentage of revenue. No, no, we don't have any of that. Yeah. You know, we get some escalators in there annually, you know, to cover costs. I get that, but um, yeah, no, I just, I with single-use building buddy, if they, if somebody, if I were to leave and default on my lease, this building is gonna sit empty for a very long time. Uh, because he wants to come in and plow over a pool and take all the fitness to come in, it's gonna cost somebody a couple million bucks to retrofit this place, and I'm the perfect buyer, so we're just, you know, they've gone from. An extraordinarily high number to something. Where they're being a little bit more reasonable, and I'm just waiting for them to get to the right number so I can, you know, we can acquire it. So you have a lap pool, you put a lap pool on your? Well, it's got, it was when we acquired it, it had a full, it had a full size pool in it. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, 25 meter pool, yeah. Yeah, uh, when you get it and you get the space, you get all the equipment in, I mean, how much work marketing do you have to do to drive people there? Um, It depends. So, If the business is really in bad shape, then we We look at it in phases, um. And before I spent a ton of money on marketing on a location, I really go in and we try to operationalize and make it very efficient, um, get the staffing right, get all the equipment working right, clean it up, um. You know, just, just show it probably the, the, the, um, tenderness and caring, it's probably not been shown for quite some time and do some, you know, superficial things to make it look like we're, well, we not make it, but we're investing into the clubs. And sometimes That word of mouth will blow it up, right, and they'll say, holy crap, somebody's coming in here and investing in this club, and it's going back to where it was before it fell, and so we'll get a rush from that. We usually see just from doing that, about a 10% bump in revenue right there. Yeah, that's it, that is just from traffic just driving by and say, hey man, I used to go here. Yeah, I have nowhere to go now, yeah, yeah. Yeah, um, and then when we get to the point. Where we, uh, where we want to market something, it's, you know, we don't, we probably don't market as well as we should. Because I have a hard time. I have a hard time connecting. And then marketing guys would kill me if I said this. Um, it's like voodoo for me, you know, if I like if I do print mailing and I spent $10,000 on print mailing, holy shit, what? I didn't get $10,000 on memberships out of that, or did I? Nobody can, I can't have any and we, you know, they don't bring in the flowers, but you don't know whether or not they saw the flyer. That's why they're there and we asked, you know, so it's kind of traditional, traditional marketing is, I just haven't been able to wrap my arms around that. You know, when we start looking at Facebook and Instagram, and now TikTok and all those things. Uh, we can, we can measure that and we can see the success of that, but it's, it's not, it's not our marketing isn't just about, hey, you know, we're top shape gym, come see us. It's trying to put relevant content out in the marketplace that positions us as experts in what we do, and you should come see it because of that. Yeah, I, I got a buddy that owns the Tucson Strength there. He doesn't do any, he doesn't spend money on marketing. He just tells this story on Facebook. Yeah, and he's, you know, he charges it's $50 and up a month versus the $9 at Choose fitness where it's. That's circling the drain right there, 9 bucks a month. Oh my God, that's uh, I can't, I can't imagine how many people you have to bring in and what the turnover is, uh, to, to get the break even on that. Oh, and it's 10 times the amount of work, cause if you, cause if you have 3000 members, you know, paying you $9 a month versus, you know, 1000 members paying you $40 a month. It's, it's 1/3 of the traffic and, and harshness on your equipment. It's 1/3 of the work. And honestly, What we found is the people that pay $9 or $10 a month cause when we, there's a couple clubs that we took over that or had $10 memberships, they bitched the most. They complained the loudest and uh. You know, without membership January 1st goes like this and the attendants goes like that right after all I do is all I would do is complain. um, so we got, I got rid of the $10 membership and we saw a spike in revenue once once that crowd left. I mean, let's, let, let's, uh, as a Planet Fitness, you know, uh uh Planet Fatness. Let them have them. I don't, they can have them, and I, and I don't see them as a competitor. I see them as training wheels for when they want to get serious about their fitness. They'll come see us. So, how many locations do you have currently running and open now? 9, we have 9, we'll have, we'll have uh 10. Starting November 1st. Yeah, and what, how does it, how do you roll up all the the financials? Is it, you know, do you have a CPA running that they show you daily or does he just send you reports or do you have access to QuickBooks or White Plains or whatever it is? Yeah, it's QuickBooks. Um, so, fortunately my wife is a is a accountant by trade, and she's a CFO, so she's, um, she runs the books, so, um, I, I, I, uh. We grew pretty quickly and, you know, 2 years ago I started down the path of trying to get P&Ls to our, to our managers so that they could see, you know, how we, how I wanted to approach the business from a PNL perspective on a quarterly basis and by giving them targets and, and compensation associated with that. But then, you know, COVID hit and I really couldn't, I really couldn't, it wasn't fair to our managers to say, hey, I want you to increase profit and, you know, reduce expenses when I, I don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, right? Yeah. So I look at, and we had traditionally been looking biweekly at It's very simple metric, and it was, it's almost scary, simple to see if we were being successful. Every two weeks, I would have the managers out, we all get on the phone call, we talk about three things number of new memberships versus the number of cancellations and what equipment wasn't working. And as long as the number of cancellations didn't exceed the number of new memberships, I knew we were headed in the right direction. uh, and I think it's only happened once in one club. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's almost like a sass, uh, you know, reoccurring billing, right? And they have to give you notice and they'll cancel or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they have to give us 30 days' notice. So if they, if they bill on the 1st and they tell they're they're gonna cancel on the 2nd, they get billed the next month, then they can. So you have 9 locations now, and each one is a separate LLC under a holding company? No, um, um, we have a few different LLCs, um. Not not all of them are under their own LLC. Um, we're working on moving the real estate out of, out of, out of them into their own LLCs and, and all that fun stuff. So, going forward, we probably each location will now be its own LLC, you know, when we were starting out, one of the challenges we had. Was this whole personal guarantee or corporate guarantee on leases and cause they didn't know who we were. So now we have some credibility and now I can negotiate because I've got some strength. I can negotiate in, yeah, here's a separate LLC, no personal guarantee. You can, we'll corporate, we're corporately guaranteed underneath this LLC but You know, that LLC goes away, you can't come after the rest of us. Yeah. Did you ever get a uh somebody co-signer do that like your uncle come back for that or? No, no, no, no, but I, I have a, I have a pretty strong operations team and, and, um. She's also a partner. She's our VP of operations. I, I gave her some equity in the business to, uh, they, she bought in then I gave her some equity in the business to make sure she's whole, uh, and she's really, um, she's very good at what she does. Uh, but she's the exact opposite of, of, of me, which is probably a good thing if you were to think about it from a high level, cause she fills in, she fills in my gaps from an operational standpoint, cause if I had to go. You know, manage staff every day. I'd probably lose my mind, uh, she, you know, and that's something that's her, yeah, it's her strength, and we don't see eye to eye many things, you know, we don't, we clash quite a bit, but You know, I've gotten some pretty good mentoring that was. It's your business, man. You just, uh, you stay above the business and let her run it. She's what's what she's getting paid to do. You don't grow it, let her run it. You feel like, you know, talking about your uncle again, where he was in so many different industries that do you feel like that, you know, fitness is great, I love it, uh, you know, I understand what the KPIs critical drivers are and and then get to a size that's valuable to a bigger fish, that you're kind of just duplicating what your uncle did to Yeah, excuse me, yeah, I think so. I mean, that was, I love fitness, um, but I, I, I really like money too. Um, So it would be really fun to, I mean, I think it'd be really fun to see this get to. You know, we're approaching 10 million in revenue, but I'd like to see it get to 30 million in revenue, and I think the e-bit they'll start to get. Pretty, pretty fun from a multiple perspective when you, when you cross that $10 million dollar mark. But We're also, we're also challenged with all of a sudden there's not a lot of gyms for sale, right? So we're, you know, I'm back on the phone call cold calling people and I got involved in Roland's in Roland's classes, cause I really, I needed I needed some insight and some perspective on how else can I grow this business. Um. And so I've kind of taken the approach over the last couple of months, is looking at our sphere of influence of the places that we do business and doesn't or are there tangential opportunities that maybe aren't totally fitness related, but they aren't gyms that we can bring in and grow? Yeah, the adjacency acquisitions. Yeah, so we're looking at. You know, an apparel company, which is pretty exciting. Right. What's the uh what's the brand, it's Top Fitness, right? The Top shape gym. Top gym, yeah, yep, yep. So we're looking at an apparel company that I'm pretty excited about. It's in the UK so I have to figure that one out. You couldn't find apparel company in the United States. This one is pretty exciting. I don't, I don't, it's a huge Instagram and Facebook following. They have great numbers, and he just wants out. He's got another technology business that he's involved in his VC group said, listen, you gotta get rid of this, otherwise we're not gonna give you any money. So, um, you know, he's pretty motivated, I think, uh, I just, I had to solve the I have to solve the 6 hour time difference and figure that out, which I think we could do. And then we're also looking at, you know, a couple other things like uh uh corporate wellness, uh corporate wellness company that has technology that, you know, we can enable a sales team to go out and do corporate wellness in the area as well as, you know, throughout the United States and, and what do you referring to that? I mean, is it corporate wellness like you go to corporations and teach them wellness, wellness, yeah, mental, physical, financial, uh, all, all the wellness type of programs, and, and, and that's important because Businesses are now figuring out that if they can educate their employees to take care of themselves, that lowers their insurance costs and oh yeah, and now, now it's, you know. Uh, you know, people say COVID was bad for gyms. It got, it got, and I don't get me wrong, it got rid of a lot of players in the health care in the bus in the gym business, and it's sad to see that, but the strong survive and it also probably. You know, the bright side of this is if there's any bright side to COVID, people are now more aware of their health, and they're now looking at themselves saying, I probably need to do something because the first comorbidity, and it doesn't matter what doctor you talk to if you're overweight, obese, and you had COVID, they stuck you right on a ventilator, they stuck you right in the ER and you just stayed there. Yeah. Yeah, that's a, the big, you know, the core morbidity rates of people that are healthy versus the ones that are unhealthy or overweight. It was just so much higher and you've got to take that into account and. Yeah, I have a friend that's Heavily involved in the Navy SEAL program. And uh you know, they were forced or they were uh they were attempting to force all the Navy SEALs. You know how many COVID cases they had amongst. How many fatalities they had against all the Navy SEALs. No, 0, I mean cause they're all in great shape. They're all great shape, right? And what's the correlation? It's not hard. Stay in better shape, take care of yourself, your body can fight your immune system's healthy, you could fight diseases better. Right, if you do get COVID, it you'll recover a lot faster and you'll have your immunity system. Yeah, you bet, you bet. So you're looking for agency type uh acquisitions, you know, aside from, you know, this is, this is the beauty of uh Roland's Epic program is looking at your platform company and all the other stuff you can bring in. I mean, are you looking at any kind of like Facebook groups, Instagram groups, anything like that to try or or would that even help? Um, I don't know locally if that would help us cause, you know, we're, we're only in about a Maybe a 90 mile radius if you draw a picture around us where I live, which is Davenport, Iowa, um, you know, if you draw that radius, I don't know if there's a big enough face group that would make sense for us. If we get into like an apparel brand, hell yeah, I mean that makes, you know, that makes total sense. He's got that brand has probably 150,000 Facebook followers, which is super attractive for us, um. So I see that as kind of a step if I could find something that has those things, it would be huge for us. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, I, and I, you know, I I toyed around with uh Trying to find a business that was completely, you know, not even gym-related, but because we have properties. I actually made an offer to a company that was Did uh window cleaning, power washing, uh, parking lot, line striping, parking lot maintenance. What else did they do? They did carpet cleaning. Oh, so this was kind of like turning your cost into a profit center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean like we have, we own 50% of our real estate that we're in. I'm like I, I have that, I have those expenses all the time, so why not just own the business and, you know, and I actually made the offer to the guy and then he got a competing offer and he just couldn't uh couldn't pull it off, which is, you know, but you got a competing offer right around when you put your put your offer in, yeah. Yeah, and, you know, I think my offer was a little opportunistic. I wasn't trying to lowball, but I was, I made a very creative offer, let's say, and he, he, uh, he didn't like it. He didn't like it, yeah, he didn't want to talk about it, so what, OK, I was like, hey, I was just trying to open the conversation. Yeah, so had do you have an offer LOY on this uh apparel business and you know, we're, we're getting close. um, I probably will. Uh, I probably will put an LOI in, um, Soon, I want to buy both of them. I actually wanna buy both companies. Um, I have to answer some questions about our team, you know, who can, because the last thing I want to do is buy something that I gotta go run, although I probably would get involved short term, um, but I need to be able to make sure I've got the people here that can help me. Yeah, that's an ecom type critical driver type business. Yeah expertise. Uh, so yeah, I've had, we've, I have owned a supplement website. That was another acquisition I did. I had back in About 5 or 6 years ago, I had a, and it was actually I had the website before I had uh Top Shade Gym, we had Top Shape supplements. And we had 5 different websites and, you know, we did, we did about $500 million a year in, in fitness supplements. And I bought that business off somebody, uh, grew it, and then almost overnight got killed by Google. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they gave me that, that business went from doing, you know, $50,000 a month in revenue that, you know, 15 to 20% margins to doing $5000 a month. I mean literally overnight. Was that Google uh SEO or Google PPC type change? No, so Google, we had. We were running basically 5 different uh website stores, and all 5 had different domains, different brands, but Google at the time would let you have data feed, and they would upload it and you could upload your data feed into their. Into their world, so they did a search on protein powder, you know, the top websites would come up. Well, I had, I had one data feed for 5 websites, so the 1st 4 websites would be my website, but it was the same store, same products with different, just basically different branding. Oh yeah, yeah. And they caught that shit, and excuse my French, and they, they didn't like that, and then they said I, they said because of the of the data feed I was getting from my warehouse or my distributors, there was some stuff in there that that qualified me to be a pharmacist, and that I didn't have the appropriate licensing, so they kicked me off of kicked me off of the Google feed for about 90 days until I could get, you know, actually, I had to um appeal their decision. You know, do a bunch of different things, shut a couple stores down and then by the time we got back up and running, I mean that that traffic was gone. That was gone. That's like somebody referred to it. It's this Google snap, man. You take half your population or more than your population and you're dead. Yeah, I mean, Google, Google, they, they didn't care. They just, whatever. Yeah, what did that teach you about that, you know, aside from uh not relying on one source of traffic. Um, You know, I think that business is folly. I mean, you have to expect the unexpected. Yeah, would that be a business that you could now be an adjacent business for your? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, I looked at firing it back up, um, and firing it back up. About once a year I look at firing it back up and, and putting the code back out there, um, which we, you know, which we may or may not do. But I cause I, you know, I thought about. You know, one of the challenges we had with that business was just fraud. You know, people would order stuff with stolen credit card information, get it delivered, and then you would, you know, then the, the person who actually had the credit card would fight it. Not only did you lose the money, but you also lost the products, you get landing on both sides. Oh my God. Yeah, so 15 to 20% margins, that's just not a lot of room for mistakes. No, and it was all volume based, right? So we were trying to kill the volume, but it makes sense when you can. You know, you drop ship and they'll they'll send it out for you, um, and you don't have to, you don't have to warehouse it. It was pretty, it was pretty interesting, but when fraud starts to set in, that was also really challenging for us because we didn't have any way at the time, and now I think they've solved that problem is to authenticate somebody as a user, right, uh, with two-way authentication, now you can do that, that's automatic, um. But We also have been because we have now 9 or 10 locations, we thought, you know, it'd be great service for our members to add a, you know, to add a subscription fee to their, to their uh membership that allowed them to buy supplements at a wholesale cost, and then they would buy them, they would buy them as almost like a Sam's Club, you know, membership fee. And they would just drop ship to our location, which we, if we spend over 200 bucks, it ships for free, and they would just pick it up next time they come to the gym. OK so, yeah, I got, uh, I, I have a protein sent to me from Amazon, and guess who's the number one position in Amazon. It's Amazon's protein. Yeah, yeah, and so we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about necessarily the margins on the protein of the other the supplements, it'd be more about. You know, can I get them in a recurring revenue model again that says they're gonna pay an extra pay me an extra $10 a month, that's gonna save them $50 a month because they can buy stuff at wholesale cost. Take, take advantage of my price. Well, as long I mean if it adds to your, you know, an upsell, but it adds gotta add to your profit margin too, so doesn't cost me anything, right? I mean, it's an extra 10 or $20 a month off that number. And it really doesn't cost anything because it's gonna ship for free and they pick it up at the at the, it might be some, I guess you could say there's some labor costs to count it out and set it aside for somebody to make sure they get it, but I mean those those are fixed costs for me anyways because those people are paid to be there anyways. Very cool, great story, man. Where, where, so what have you learned from all this or where you're at now versus where you're at, you know, when you started this journey? Um, uh, so. I wish I could have taken. Some of the hesitancy to dive into this entrepreneurial space much sooner. It seems like as I've gotten older, and that could just come with time and success, and obviously, knowing that if you fail cause we failed, it's not gonna hurt you. I mean, there, you could always recover. So, I wish I would have gone. You know, if I were, if I were to give advice to my and I've told my 20 soon to be 21 year old son in college, go hawks, um. If you can find a business and you can start a business, go do it. Go start a business. Go find a business, get involved, uh, do it now. I mean, do it and go hard, uh, chase it cause there's nothing, there's nothing more rewarding than building a business and seeing it succeed. There's also nothing more depressing than failing, but, you know, you can learn from that. But punching the clock, you don't need to do it. So many ways, so many ways in this world to make money, and there's nothing wrong with punching the clock. I did it. I love my career, um. I don't know anybody who, I mean, there's a lot of people that most people have done that first. Yeah, I love my career and I, you know, I get offers all the time for, you know, multiple six-figure salaries and, you know, good cop plans to go help build build businesses and I don't know if I'd do it again just yet, cause this is fun. It's scary, it's fun, but I think people like me enjoy that, and they enjoy my other uncle, who was, you know, he was younger than my, the uncle I learned from, also shared a great piece of advice with me. It's like life's no fun unless you're staring over the edge. That's true, right? I should go. I mean, it's like an older guy you go, uh, sometimes you gotta go play some football and rough up just like feel what pain feels like so you could be feel alive again, like. Yeah, yeah, I, you know, and, and I, I think, uh, Gary Vanner Kut said something a couple of years ago that really, really stuck with me also. You want big problems. Yeah. Now you get paid rewarded for solving big problems too, yep. So if you want, you want a little, little problems, just live little. That's true, so true. Yeah, I think I, I really appreciate the time you spent with me, Matt, um, and how, how does somebody reach out to you if they've got an apparel company in United States and they want to sell it to you because you've already got 9 locations. Yeah, I mean, I, that's uh you can reach me at Matt M A T T at topshapegym.com. You know, my cell phone number is 563-940-9981. All right, well, I hope that helps. I mean, yeah, I really appreciate the time you spent with me, and I guess we'll see you today with, uh, Patch Baker's, uh, I'll be there for the first hour for sure. All right, man, thank you so much, man. You have a great night. Have a great day. Cheers.