He Got Fired By His DAD… So He Built a $60M/yr Empire

Episode 596: Sam Parr ( https://twitter.com/theSamParr ) talks to Craig Fuller ( https://x.com/FreightAlley ) about how he turned dying hobby magazines into a cash flow machine. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:45) Economics of long-haul trucking (3:36) Getting fired from the family business (5:30) Fuel cards for truck drivers (6:40) How FreightWaves hit $20M ARR in 2 years (9:08) Acquiring FLYING for $3.5M (12:14) Opportunity: Depressed media properties (16:02) From losing $8 per subscriber to profitability in 1 year (20:31) A media side hustle becomes a real estate main hustle (22:55) Craig's tolerance for being leveraged (25:32) Pre-selling $28M units pre-construction (28:51) Diversity, Asymmetrical risk, and generational security (31:11) Teams to diversify your time (34:21) Building a portfolio of hobby magazines (37:20) Content to commerce playbook (47:03) The story of William Randolph Hearst (51:32) What's the chase? (53:15) "The best thing to give a founder is an enemy" — Links: • FreightWaves - https://www.freightwaves.com/ • Knight-Swift - https://knight-swift.com/ • Firecrown - https://firecrown.com/ • The Chief - https://tinyurl.com/36khrt8y — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  All right, my friends, today's episode, it's special for me and it's gonna be special for anyone out there who's a creator or who owns a media company. Let me explain. So I've got this friend named Craig Fuller. Craig Fuller runs this company called Freight Waves. It's a data business, but they have a media arm and it's a huge company. They've raised tens of millions in funding and they make tens of millions in recurring revenue. Huge business. However, on the side, he ended up buying a bunch of magazines, including flying magazines, a bunch of boating magazines. Very weird of him to do that and I wanted to do a podcast about that. Turns out, he's bought all of these niche magazines for a very small amount of money and he's only about three years into business and the company's doing around 60 million

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  in revenue and 12 million in profit. And it's his prediction that by 2030, it's gonna do a billion in revenue, which is A, insane that that's someone's side project, that they're doing that. And B, I wanted to learn all about it. I wanted to learn about the model that he's doing where he's basically buying these magazines and then he's selling the audience different products and services, including like building an airplane hangar and selling space in that hangar for a flying magazine, things like that. So, if you have an audience, if you wanna build an audience, if you wanna build a big business on top of that audience, this podcast is for you. All right? Check it out.

• 1:29Sam Parr?

  We're live. This is just how, we just get right into it.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  It's not often that someone's side hobby becomes almost cooler than their main thing, particularly given that your main thing is this like massive hit. So you're Craig Fuller, you've got this thing called Freight Waves, which is a data business, but you guys also have a popular media arm and you just, you display most of your financials online as if you're a publicly traded company almost. And I don't know what the revenue is, but it's somewhere in the high tens of millions in recurring revenue. And then you also have, you've raised, what, 90 million dollars for that?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  65 in venture capital, but we raised some debt on top of it. So total about, a little bit under 80 million or a little bit over 80 million.

• 2:10Sam Parr?

  And then your, your latest kind of side project that is not really the size of most people's side projects, it's Firecrowd Media where you've bought dozens of magazines and you've parlayed that into like, you've turned Flying Magazine into like a country club, but for flying enthusiasts. And so you've like bought, you know, thousands of acres of land, you've built a, an airport, and now you've, you're buying even more pieces of property, more stuff. And I think what Firecrowd does, what 50 million this year in revenue?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  60 million, right? So, um, is where we'll, we'll finish this year. So.

• 2:44Sam Parr?

  Golly, man. And what I didn't realize, I was doing research, I didn't realize that trucking kind of runs through your family, right?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, my father started what's now, or he sold the business last year, but it became the fifth largest trucking company in the US. And my uncle started the eighth largest, what's now the eighth largest trucking company in the US.

• 3:02Sam Parr?

  Were your uncle and father competitors?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're pretty, pretty diehard competitors.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  But are they tight? Are they, are they good family members?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Nowadays, they're much better. You know, they're, they do get along now, but there was a period of time where they just absolutely hated each other.

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  My family is in, my father's a produce broker. So I grew up with truckers and it's an interesting industry because the people who own the businesses can be pretty wealthy, but they're still rednecks. Like they're still like blue, they're like blue collar guys, but they're not necessarily always traditionally educated and they're still rough, even if they're quite wealthy. Was your dad like a, like a blue collar guy, even though that he ran this huge company?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, he's a blue collar guy. I mean, he, he, you know, he looked presentable in a suit and he's talking to Wall Street investors. I mean, he certainly is, you know, he's presentable. He's not going to embarrass himself in front of folks, but he, he is, you know, he's, he's a finance guy. I mean, ultimately in trucking, you're operating a business that operates with single digit margins, you know, one to three percent margins. And so, uh, you've got to know how to operate that business. It's an owner operator type business. And so he certainly is an operator.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  And he eventually, I think recently sold that business for like $800 billion, right?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, he merged it into Knightswith, uh, which is the largest. It was the second largest trucking merger in history. Uh, the company did about $2.5 billion when it sold for 800 million.

• 4:25Sam Parr?

  And you were working for him and I read that you worked for him starting at a young age. You kicked ass, but for some reason you butted heads with the executive team. You got fired, I think in your late twenties or early thirties. And you started, shockingly, which I can't believe you did this, day trading. And you were like, I gotta build something. And so at thirty-six, I think, or thirty-four, you were like, I wanna do almost like day trading, but for freight stuff. Is that right?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I got fired twice. So I got fired from my father's trucking company, US Express, in two thousand and five. It was actually my older brother who became the CEO of US Express that had to be fired in two thousand and five.

• 5:06Sam Parr?

  Dude, your family's a bunch of assholes, man.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Pretty much, but I love them, but they're, this is, this is a family tradition. You fire and you go out and start your own business. And then they had a payments company, a fuel card company that they had incubated, that I took over and scaled up and then we sold part of it to US Bank. And we were doing both fleet card processing and debit card processing, payment processing for banks.

• 5:31Sam Parr?

  What's a, what's a fuel card? I know that truckers have them, but I don't entirely know what they do or how they make money.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  When truckers wanna buy fuel, you figure two hundred gallons if they're truly topping off their tank, is they're gonna fill up with, you know, a thousand to twelve hundred to fourteen hundred dollars.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  Wow, okay. And what, they use some card and do they get perks or something? What's the business?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  No, they, it's for fraud management because what will happen is if you don't man, I mean, think about it, you've got, you know, US Express had nine thousand truck drivers and you're giving them all an expense account that effectively they, they're buying fuel, but they're also doing over the road maintenance. So if they need tires or they need, a truck breaks down, you know, those things can be ten, twenty thousand dollars on a breakdown situation or could be, you know, thousands of dollars in tires or fuel. And so, you know, a truck driver is responsible for probably six to eight thousand dollars of expenses per month when you look at total, what the total cost of an expenses. And so you have a lot of fraud that ends up happening. And so fleet cards are there to manage the fraud, both on the fuel spend, but also on the, on the, you know, all the maintenance and stuff.

• 6:37Sam Parr?

  Got it. I never knew what those did. All right, cool. And so you're, you're growing this thing, whatever, it's working out fine. And then you get into FreightWaves, Freight Alley, that, that works out good. Uh, how long did it take to, to kinda get into the tens of millions in revenue?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  It's about $20 million business by in two years, three years, something like that.

• 6:58Sam Parr?

  How did it grow so fast?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  The formula, right? Like, timing was great. This was when a lot of venture capital investment made into the space. And then you also had this digitization that was taking place where companies were trying to digitize the supply chain. And then, you know, at the end of the day, I had relationships. It's funny because my dad didn't put any money into the company. He told me I'd be a bad CEO and refused to invest in the business. And so I had to go raise venture capital.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  Dude, are you and your, are you and your family close?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. My dad and I talk, he's now like, after he sold US Express, he's now one of my largest investors in Firecrown. He actually is my largest investor in Firecrown. So we're actually really tight.

• 7:37Sam Parr?

  I've been following you for a while. And when I think of like a, a, a good media CEO, you are one of the, the people that I think of. What attributes do you have that made him think that you would be a bad CEO?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I had ran a business, a payments business. They fired me in 2014 because it was a tech business. And technology businesses, while they generate a lot of margin as they scale, they actually burn a lot of capital. You know, trucking's a cash flow business. He didn't understand that, you know, a tech business as it would scale would actually consume capital. So he got really mad and he would, didn't want to raise any money. So he fired me because he didn't think I could run a, a business that would be profitable. Because that's not how technology companies typically work in their early phases. What's funny about that business is, is that's one of the most valuable assets families brought all the go now. It just got a $500 million valuation last, you know, sold some stock in September of last year. So it's done well.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  But I, you know, I've been out of that business for many years.

• 8:36Sam Parr?

  That's all right. So this is the main thing that I wanted to talk about. So there's this blog that I love. It's called Flash and Flames. I'm pretty sure that like,

• 8:49Sam Parr?

  Only maybe 10,000 people a month read Flash in Flames. So if you're listening to this and you're a fan of like media businesses, this is my favorite blog on the internet. It's written by this guy named Colin Morrison. He's based in England. He wrote this article that I think it was called, uh, why magazines are the new trophy asset or something like that. And I read that you saw that article and you're like, I'm going to go out and buy magazines. Is that right?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was reading it and I was, you know, it was essentially the trophy asset. And he was using the example of Mark Benioff buying Time Magazine and some others. And it was really interesting because I was like, you know, I could never buy Time Magazine, you know? The two media businesses that I would own that would be trophy assets far beyond it would be like Bloomberg would be number one. And, you know, owning, owning something of CNBC scale would also be another. Obviously there's a way outside my league, so they're not happening. And I was thinking to myself, I had just taken up aviation, taken up flying. And I was reading Flying Magazine and I was pretty uninspired. And so I was like, it would be cool to own like an aviation magazine, to own Flying Magazine because that would be my trophy.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I'm a pilot and that's sort of what I would, I would like to do. And so it inspired me to reach out to the owners of Flying Magazine and asked if they would sell the magazine. And they said, it's not for sale, but we're happy to talk to you. And I made an offer and they ended up selling it to me. And that sort of, it was started out the same, it started off as a side hustle. I didn't actually intend, I thought print magazines were dead and dinosaurs read print magazines. And I became very skeptical of the whole print magazine business model. But when I bought it, I fell in love with the, not just the content and what you could do with it, but also the value what print brings to an audience. And so what I found is that really these print magazines are completely undervalued.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Uh, that nobody will touch them because they view, have the same philosophy that I had about them dying. Yet they own these fantastically great communities and audiences that have been around for decades. And particularly as you get into sort of the older populations that have grew up with magazines is they still have these really important, um, sort of connections to the brands. And we found that that's a really interesting opportunity.

• 11:08Sam Parr?

  Were you liquid when you decided to buy it? Or were you like, I, if they, if the price that they want is in the millions, I'm going to have to go get money from someone else?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  No, I had enough money to pull that off. So.

• 11:19Sam Parr?

  With your money, do you keep a large percent in like the S and P 500? And this was just a fraction of it? Or was this like a meaningful amount?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  It was just, I mean, it was a meaningful amount relative to my liquidity. I mean, in terms of my total net worth, not significant, but I have a lot of paper worth as a pincher back founder tends to be. But you don't have a lot of liquidity. So relative to liquidity, yeah, it was a big, it was a big number.

• 11:43Sam Parr?

  Then what was the thinking is I'm going to have to buy this and I'm going to have to spend some hours per week to making sure that it doesn't lose money?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Well, it was profitable. I mean, it was generated about half a million dollars of EBITDA a year as a standalone entity, about two and a half million in revenue. So it was a small, this is a small business and we buy businesses at three to five times EBITDA is typically the number of these things trade at. So we're not talking about a huge, like this wasn't a huge capital outlay.

• 12:06Sam Parr?

  So it was like 1.5 to 2.5 million dollars is what it cost?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  You know, total purchase price is about three and a half million when you look at cash and, and some deferred expenses and deferred payments. So it came out to about three and a half million dollars, uh, which, you know, seven times by, you know, two and a half million upfront and a million deferred and, uh,

• 12:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but then you got to deal with like, dude, journalists, a lot of times I hire journalists, they're fucking pains in the asses. And like, when I think of like all my potential side hobbies, I'm like, I'd rather be a beekeeper than like own a freaking magazine, deal with these employees, or I'd rather get to like going for walks or hikes. I don't know about this.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, like I, I mean, I had, you know, Freightways has 40 or if you look at total contributors that are journal, who qualifies as journalists or contributors, have 40 to 50. So I, I knew the, what the, you know, I knew what the rodeo was going to look like for running, you know, having teams of journalists work for you. What was different though with magazines is these are different than sort of younger, sort of uh, digital native journalist or, or journalists that have been sort of working in newsrooms. Is magazine journalists don't do it because they make a lot of money. They do it because they love the content. And, and they're also, there's a sense of defeatism that has existed across all publishers.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And I've seen this in the multitude of acquisitions they've done is where the editorial teams feel like the, the, the owners of the magazines don't love them and aren't willing to make investments in them. And they almost look at you, and I hate to use this term. Is almost liberators of their business because in some ways they they love the content. They love the subject matter. They have the relationships. They tend to be sort of micro celebrities in their own communities. So that so these are the old school influencers, if you will. And yet they get no love from corporates because what's happened is the whole magazine business model has collapsed in the last 10 years because the way that magazines made money in the past, the internet has destroyed that business model. And rather than sort of digitizing their business model or sort of evolving their business model,

• 14:10Speaker 01

  they just started to cut costs. And so that was the way they sort of fend off the inevitable. And the problem is at some point, the value that the community gets and the audience gets is diminished. And these things are just it's a it's sort of a death circle. And so what we do is we we come in, we buy them. In some ways, we liberate them from this sort of debt inevitable decline. And they feel really encouraged by that. You know, we we upgrade the paper, we upgrade the quality, we make investments in the editorial team. You know, Flying's editorial team went from sort of three folks when we bought it to 30. So you have three primary full time employees. And then you have contributors that are submitting an article that goes in the magazine.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Very different from the world you and I sort of come from, digital media, where you actually have a full time staff that's writing content on a daily basis. They're writing, they're contributing a piece that's once a month. And so it may be an airline pilot or a flight instructor or someone who really knows the jet market or the turbine market. And so you you want subject matter expertise. And typically, writing is a second is is not their primary job. They do it as a sort of a side hustle to make a little bit of money. And that's why these businesses have operated. But what they've what they've also done is they've they've not made investments in like print quality or online assets or any of that stuff.

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  How much revenue did you do in the first year of owning it? Revenue and profit?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  In 2022, I think we were about $7 million in revenue, six and a half, seven million, something like that.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  Oh, so you like?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Aggressively grew it, yeah.

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  How?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Um, because we invested in, so a couple of things we did was we invested in the magazine. We raised the price. Uh, the magazine was losing $7. So the magazine was taking in $8 per subscription, but it cost them $15.

• 16:02Sam Parr?

  $8 a month.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Eight dollars a year was the net revenue. I know you look, you look, yeah. For folks that are listening, but your face is exactly what mine was. They were generating on average $8 in revenue per subscriber per year. And it cost them $15 to fill that subscriber. They were losing and have since as far back as our data went since 2006, losing $7 per subscriber. And I said.

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  So Flying Magazine costs $8 a year to subscribe to?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  On average, the average yield, the average across the whole subscriber base. The magazine generated $8 on average per subscriber.

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  And when you say yield, that's not, uh, uh, revenue minus the hard costs.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  That is, that is the revenue. That's the top line number.

• 16:47Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's stupid that you gotta like.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  They were losing, Sam, they were losing $7 per magazine, uh, per subscriber per year.

• 16:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So like a Flying Magazine subscriber is definitely going to pay $50 a year or whatever, or.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  You would think, right? That was my reaction to it is essentially our communications to the staff were to the sales team was basically you're going to raise the rates of advertising sales because we want to go to people who, who, so on the ad sales, we raised the cost of ads, but we also just subscribers basically said, look, if somebody's not willing to spend 30 or $40 a year, then they're not really, uh, they don't care about the content. I mean, think about this. To buy an airplane, you're going to spend, you know, minimum 50,000. That's a, you know, old aircraft. To buy a, most of the folks are buying, you know, quarter of a million to a million dollar aircraft. And, and some of our audiences, 75 to a hundred million dollar airplanes.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  And so you have a, you have a, a natural. Audience that is going to spend a lot of money because they care about the hobby or they care about their careers or whatever it is. They're, if they're not willing to spend thirty or forty dollars, they're also not going to buy advertising. Because what happened is in the old days.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  And how many subscribers?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  So we, when we bought that, it was about a hundred and eight thousand subscribers.

• 18:04Sam Parr?

  That's pretty great.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Um, we actually, when we raised the price, we raised to thirty initially. It actually went down to thirty two thousand subscribers.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  No shit.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  We bled it out, but that's okay. Like, we wanted to do that. We wanted to get rid of, and there was a lot of what we call freeloaders. They were essentially targeted for advertising purposes. Uh, or they're the people, like, you may remember this, I didn't, when you were younger, is your, like, your school would have a fundraiser and you would bring home a form and your parents would sign. Like, buy a magazine they didn't care about. There was a lot of subscriptions like that where the people that were actually subscribing didn't care about the content. And I basically said, I don't want any of them. I want people who actually care about the content. And we were very successful in doing that. And then, and so we saw, uh, subscriptions grow substantially in terms of actual full paid subscriptions. And subscription dollars, we were basically doubled the subscription revenue over the course of a year.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yet it still had, like, a third of the subscribers. We went down to thirty two thousand. We're now about forty five thousand. We've grown it since.

• 19:05Sam Parr?

  And are you able to manage this growth off the cash flows of the business, or did you have to put more capital in?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I put more capital, uh, that I, I wanted to put more capital in. Like, I could have ran it tighter, but I didn't want to.

• 19:16Sam Parr?

  How much should you put in?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  You know, look, I, we total invested about forty million dollars in the business, but that's not flying. That's, that's all the acquisitions we've done and everything we've acquired.

• 19:26Sam Parr?

  But at this point in the story, you've not raised outside capital.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  No, no, I didn't raise. I actually had a, I had half a million dollars in from two brothers of early investors in Freight Waves. That bought in, they got fifteen percent of the business for five hundred thousand dollars.

• 19:39Sam Parr?

  So you grow it to seven point five in, and how much profit?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Um, the business was about break even at seven point five million, because we were not, we were not optimizing for profitability. We were optimizing for growth.

• 19:51Sam Parr?

  Who'd you hire to run it?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  So I was, I was doing a lot more day to day and I, I recruited a team to come in, uh, to, to run the day to day operations.

• 20:00Sam Parr?

  Okay, so we're at the end of 22 and I think around this time you actually were like, "Holy shit, I might have just like hit on something interesting. I should go out and buy more and do this again." Or did you first come up with the crazy idea to buy all that land?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  So I bought the land in 2021, about 1,500 acres. So originally I didn't plan on being a real estate. What we actually wanted to do was go out and build a media center connected to a runway. Cause you know, if people are going to fly in airplanes, remember at the end of the day, the content for flying is all about the airplane. Like people care less about the pilot, they care a lot about the airplane. And this is no different than a car magazine where you're going to look at the Lambo or the Ferrari. For the ADH audience, they want to see the newest aircraft being produced. And so we wanted to create a video center connected to an airport. The problem was that none of the airports in the community, five regional community airports around Chattanooga,

• 21:04Speaker 01

  were willing to sort of do anything. They said, you know, basically you have to go from the state, the municipality, the state, and the FAA have to approve it in order to get to build a media center.

• 21:14Sam Parr?

  When you say media center, you mean?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, to take video. We wanted to have a hangar that had a basically a video studio and photography studio that we can bring airplanes in. But you have to build that because there wasn't, there's no hangar, there's a national hangar shortage across the country. And because what happens is nobody wants to, municipalities who own all these airports, don't want investment in private hangars for small aircraft. They want the big airplanes. And there's just a problem of allocation. So we decided to go build our own headquarters. And I was looking for land, looking for about 50 acres and I came across this piece of land that had 1,500 acres. And it was priced at 3.65 million and I drove up there.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And it reminded me of this resort in East Tennessee called Blackberry Farm.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  My wife absolutely loves. It's sort of back to farming agriculture. So I show up there and I'm like, this looks and feels a lot like Blackberry Farm. And that was sort of the original inspiration is we wanted to create a fly-in community with a runway and home sites that are connected to the runway that had that Blackberry Farm inspired sort of experience.

• 22:25Sam Parr?

  How much did you pay for that?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  3.6 million.

• 22:28Sam Parr?

  Did you pay it or did you raise money?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  No, I borrowed from the bank. I mean, real estate is one of those things that you can go borrow money. And so remember, I'm, I have a relatively high net worth. I don't have no liquidity.

• 22:41Sam Parr?

  This is why I'm asking these questions because

• 22:45Sam Parr?

  your net worth is significantly higher than mine because your business is bigger than mine, but I'm liquid and even me, I'm like scared to make some of these bets. You don't seem to have that same fear. You seem to be way more offensive and you seem way more, I mean, look, it's not like we're inventing like electric cars or going to Mars. And so I don't want to like grandeurize it, make it too grand, but like you're outlaying a lot of cash on some really crazy ideas. You're like, I'm going to build and I'm going to buy an old magazine and I'm gonna spend more of my money and build an aviation community. Like, that's like really weird. And that's really ballsy.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  Why, what do you think you, what's that gene inside of you that makes you think these wacky things are going to work?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Because the data, like my experience suggests that it will, but you know, it's taking more shots on goal. Like, yeah, I got three and a half million dollars in an investment for a real estate project, but if it goes to zero, I still own three and a half million dollars of land, right? The end of the day.

• 23:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but that's a huge project to get into because do you know anything about real estate?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  No, but you can, you can bring in teams to go run those things, which we have. So like Sam, it's a matter of scaling businesses and hiring teams to run these things. Yeah, it's risk, but.

• 24:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I agree with you. This is just, this is just outside your, your expertise and you've made it your expertise very quickly.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, but, but media was outside my expertise. Running a data business was outside my expertise, but real estate is actually frankly. I wouldn't say it's easier. It's a, it's a, it's a different playbook that frankly can be learned. It's not as if, you know, building a SaaS business, building a data business, there's a very small number of sort of models to follow. There's a very few companies that you can sort of model your business.

• 24:38Sam Parr?

  I think the risk is lower for that, though. The risk is lower for software.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I disagree. I think real estate, real estate is so much less riskier because you actually have finite assets at the end of the day.

• 24:49Sam Parr?

  That's true. The difference, though, is when I, I can start a software, I can start an internet or data company with significantly less money than it costs to purchase a meaningful piece of property.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  But I own the land. Remember that land at 1,500 acres at $2,400 an acre has value. You can sell that land for something else. You can partition it out. You know, if you looked at that, at what an acre would go for in that community, 50 to 60,000 if it was subdivided. This wasn't. And so we knew the land had some underlying value, but we didn't know if there would be any demand for pilots. We advertised it. It was in January 2022. We actually took out ads in our own magazine to test the market.

• 25:30Sam Parr?

  What did you say in the ad?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You know, it was written as if, it was written to my wife, effectively. Like, my wife was the target audience, which is your BlackBerry Farm audience. And we wrote a story about, we're building a resort, and we didn't focus on the aviation, which is really what you would expect us to focus on. We focused on the amenities around the experience that we're going to build. We shaped, we vision shaped it. And we didn't expect to get a lot of response. We had over 300 inbound inquiries on that one ad we took out in our own magazine. And we were able to get people to sign contracts to basically reserve their spot. And we knew then we had a winner.

• 26:08Sam Parr?

  Did you, like, make a joke about the fact that you're new to this? Or, or were you, like, more professional, but you're like?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I didn't make a joke about new, but we, I mean, like, we were very transparent about the fact this was a new development.

• 26:21Sam Parr?

  Not a joke, not a joke, but being lighthearted. You're like, who knows what's gonna happen?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  I mean, ultimately, Sam, it's about we recruited recruited people that actually had experience in doing, you know, the development, the master planning community. There are groups that actually take on a lot of the burden to do the work that you need to build these things. It's not as if I'm having to 1500 acres is a huge project. You're not going to do that yourself.

• 26:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  You're going to want teams to deal with zoning issues, environmental issues, engineering issues. And we brought in airport planning consultants. We brought in development consultants. And so it's not as if I'm doing all this work myself. I have a whole team. You ask who's running these projects. I have a team that's running them that's managing all the different pieces of it.

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  And they and people wrote in and they basically said, if you're able to build this, count me in for buying a $800,000 home on that property or something like that.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  That's the lots are $600,000. So the homes are probably $2 million to $3 million.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  And did they sign and they, what did they, what did they give to you that the bank took as?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  They signed a contract and they let they put a deposit. So $40,000 an acre on a $600,000 purchase price, but they put $40,000 in per acre.

• 27:39Sam Parr?

  And you.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  $10,000 per lot.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  And was it like you basically quote pre sold? Was it like $15 million worth of these properties?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we actually got up to about $28 million in total bookings. Yeah, total reservation deposits. But we thought we were going to get through this process for environmental approval, Quikrav zoning approval. We actually thought we'd break ground by the end of 22. So we had some churn out. We've refunded their money because these are refundable deposits. It's not as if they're giving you money that you get to hold on to. It's no different than if you bought, you put a deposit on an airplane or put a deposit on a car. These are fully refundable, but we're about $15 million in total reservations right now.

• 28:20Sam Parr?

  So this project alone is awesome. But then it gets even crazier and like this is I'm just fascinated by you because I view you a little bit as a peer and that we're both like media nerds. But the way that we're different is that you're you're doing great with risk like you you're you're going you're taking more risk, I think, but it doesn't it's all working out. And this is where it gets interesting is you're like, all right, this thing worked for flying magazines. What flying magazine what happens if I go out and get more of these titles and do this whole content to commerce thing? And did you raise money for that?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Uh, not initially. Uh, so I have not raised any my father invested when he sold his trucking business last year. So he's my only outside investor other than the initial round. Everything was done by myself and I was just using bank debt, frankly, borrowing money from banks and liquidating my portfolio because I felt like I would rather invest in myself than invest in the S and P. I think the difference between Sam isn't necessarily that I'm like I am willing to take more risk. I'm also willing to take more shots on goal. I just think fundamentally like an asymmetric mindset that I have is is I may lose, let's say the real estate project went to zero, I'm gonna lose three and a half million dollars. That sucks.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  But you know what? I had been my dad cut me off. My dad fired me in 2014. I had basically like no job, nothing like it was I was for all intents and purposes on my own at rock bottom. I had to figure it out. I've done that before and so I'm not afraid of losing it all. And I know that I can get it back. And so we've applied that rule to everything that we've done and we make acquisitions under the philosophy that it's asymmetric risk is like, let's say that we buy a business or buy a magazine that's we spent half a million dollars or a million dollars and let's say it goes to zero. Let's say that we're completely wrong about a thesis and the thing is just a dog. Well, then we write off that half a million or a million dollar investment.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  But if we're right and we get a three or five or 10x multiple on that business, that creates an enormous amount of value for us. And so that's how we've approached our acquisitions. Um, and I'm willing to take bank debt because bank debt is frankly, pretty cheap.

• 30:40Sam Parr?

  By the way, I think about money differently than you and I think it's cool to hear your perspective because I think I should do it more. But the way that I think about it with privately as a entrepreneur of private companies, I think.

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  If most of my money, if most of my net worth is illiquid, any liquidity that I get, whether it's annual cash flows or it's from selling, I sold one of my companies, I take all that money and I stock it away in like a safe thing where it's like, uh, if all else goes to shit from whatever I have, that is enough forever. And so that's how I view it. So like whatever, how much money I have, I, I stick it away and I'm like, that doesn't exist basically. And I'm going to go and use a very much smaller sum to go start more companies. And I'll try to live off of my income from those companies. And if they sell, great. If they don't, hey, I still have this other thing that I have. What you're doing is different than me.

• 31:35Sam Parr?

  And I like what you're doing because I think it's bolder and I think it's probably a bit more fun if it works. Which is you're like, even though I've got this private, this other private company that it's doing quite well. So it's not going to go to nothing, but I have some liquidity. I'm going to pile that liquidity into more interesting, but potentially risky things.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Well, I like freightways at some point will sell. Like it will sell and it will do be an exit. That to me is the nest egg, like for, for my long-term. Like I know it's going to sell. Who knows what it sells for, but there is value, fundamental tangible value in the business. So for me.

• 32:09Sam Parr?

  And it's big enough that it's slightly de-risk or very de-risk.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's totally de-risked and, and there's a lot of value in that business. And I have a salary. It's not as if I, I'm not like the board takes care of me and I. So for me, I have that asset. Everything else is, that will set my family up for genera-, you know, for at least a generation. Like my kids would be able to go to college, be able to buy a house and so forth. So I'm not worried about like my ability to survive if everything else falls down. But I do think diversifying my risk through all these other projects actually enhances my long-term returns, uh, particularly if I'm using my balance sheet to borrow money from the bank at frankly relatively low cost.

• 32:52Sam Parr?

  But what about diversifying your time? That's probably that.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's what teams do for you, right? Like you hire people to run it. Like, you know, Preston Holland, who I think you know. We brought Preston into initially run flying. He's now running a finance business that we've got. That is doing aircraft financing. We brought in a team to run. We have Reese that's running our real estate project. So again, and I fired myself from almost every functional role I had at Freight Waves is.

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  Oh, God, are you? Are you chairman or CEO of Freight Waves?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  I'm CEO, but I the day to day, day to day. Functions inside that business. I have Spencer Pyleland is my CFO and COO. Is running most of the day to day. Most of the day to day decisions are going through him. I'm working through strategy and thinking about the long term prognosis of the business. So I can run and do deals and look at additional ways to lever this business up. Without getting caught up in the individual sort of minutia of running a business.

• 33:50Sam Parr?

  So how many titles has Firecrown acquired at this point?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  We're about 54, I think, is the number.

• 33:57Sam Parr?

  Did you buy them in batches? Like you bought like?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  We do. You typically, I mean, publishers in the magazine business, it's hard to get scale with one title. Just because there's a finite audience that will care about that content. And so typically a publisher. And here's the thing about magazines is that only 25% of the content. A 25% of the operations of that business actually is value added to a customer. You have audience development, you have magazine production, you have layout, like a customer doesn't experience that. They. Only about 25% of the cost structure is. The editorial product or the photography. So. You, you need a lot of infrastructure to run a successful magazine or frankly, media business operation. I think you know the media side, magazines.

• 34:39Sam Parr?

  It was insane. Basically the hustle. We could have, I mean, we were at about 2 million subscribers when I sold. Now I don't know what it's at. Let's say three or three and a half.

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  Basically three people on editorial, if we were selling ads. So when I ran the company, three people on editorial. And 37 people selling ads and managing ads and making it grow.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and those three people bring all the value.

• 35:06Sam Parr?

  It's crazy, right?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, it's just how these media businesses work is you have a couple of people that are up front and the rest of it is infrastructure. And so what you typically see when we buy a magazine is we're having, we're buying a portfolio. We're buying not just one title, but three or four titles that come along with it. And so we've done a, you know, maybe two, maybe 20 different acquisitions that have made up that portfolio. But some of them have been really big. We bought Bonnier, which is like the, the largest publisher in Sweden, the sort of a Rupert Murdoch family of Sweden. And they owned a bunch of boating titles, which we bought last, been last fall. And really we own boating, yachting, selling world, fish, saltwater sportsmen.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And so really this large marine title and aviation, we bought a number of aviation titles through various portfolios. And then we just recently bought model trains, a bunch of railroad titles and astronomy titles. So bringing that all together, that puts us the whole portfolio.

• 36:08Sam Parr?

  Just whatever 12 year old Craig is into boats, planes, RC trades.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  So it's almost like my five year old's like dreams. So I mean, think about it, it's boats, it's airplanes, it's trains and space. It's pretty cool for like a five year old boy, it's pretty magical, you know? But what we're buying are these audiences that love the content. They're, they're enthusiasts and effectively by owning the, the magazine, which we financed through the, the P and L of the magazine itself, subscriptions and advertising. We make money in media, but we're ultimately buying the audience itself to sit, to offer some other product or service to them.

• 36:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So let's walk through this playbook. So the playbook is to acquire customers profitably and you do that by having a media arm that its own business, or having a media company that is, is own business and make the profit via subscriptions and advertising. Step two is to make sure the audience, I imagine you'll have to correct me. It's you're, you're doing something in your head of like, will they spend a lot of money on something? Is that right?

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, essentially. But if they're enthusiast, if a category is big and they're enthusiastic about the category, then the answer is pretty much yes. I mean, the thing remember about magazines, and particularly magazines that are decade old magazines, is these things have survived potentially the great neon magazines that are over 100 years old. They've survived multiple wars, they've survived multiple pandemics, they've survived the Great Depression. Like, the audience truly cares about the content enough to subscribe. And if they've, if these magazines have survived the internet age and multiple phases of it, they're going to be around for many, many years. And so essentially, we're buying it because they care deeply about

• 37:57Speaker 01

  the content. And then ultimately, they can buy another product or service.

• 38:01Sam Parr?

  And then is step three, like raise prices and sell ads better? Or like, do you think about that?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think we look at it in the same step, right? So like, we do, we treat these, we have a, we have a media business which runs the media operation. And then as we go find commerce, so let's say aircraft finance, we find essentially an executive, a CEO, if you will, that can run that business through its own P and L, that's separate than the media business.

• 38:29Sam Parr?

  But in order to finance that, like, these people wouldn't be selling you these businesses if they were kicking ass. But you're been able, you've been able to make them kick ass a lot better. And so you must be doing something just on the media side that they didn't do. What are those things?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, effectively, you're fixing a lot of the cost structure and looking at it in terms of the spend opportunity of that audience and create data that can, you know, really look at data from the perspective of intent for someone that wants to buy a product. So if you're, if you're reading Flying Magazine, You're either a pilot, an aspiring pilot, or an aircraft owner, or somebody who wants to own an airplane. That's the four prime. I mean, there's people who read flying because they like airplanes, but it's a small piece of the audience. And so we know each of those categories are going to spend some money in each of their outcomes. So a student pilot is going to take flying lessons. It's going to cost them $10,000. If he's going to be a career pilot, he's going to make $15 million

• 39:30Speaker 01

  over the course of his career. A lot of opportunity to help him along his journey. If they're an aircraft buyer, prospective buyer, they're going to buy an airplane. They're also going to buy insurance finance out of that. They're also going to have a lot of expenses to own that aircraft throughout their life. And so these are the journeys that we have, and that's ultimately what we're doing is we're optimizing the magazine, the advertisers, based on intent, not based on the fact that this is a number. And what we've explained to the owners, the advertisers, is wouldn't you rather reach the 100 people that are going to buy your airplane versus the 100,000 people that, you know, 99% of those people are never going to buy any of your products?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  That's what we need to do is actually get into that intent data. And we do that through digital. Like, print is just one aspect of what we do, but it's driving intent data to actually be able to demonstrate to them there's a value to that customer.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  That was a very good pitch. And then when you hire these guys to create, so I guess airplane financing means you help people get loans to buy a plane. And then I think you have like a classified section, so people selling planes. And then now you have the real estate one. I don't know what you've done with the other titles, how you've done the same content to commerce type of play, but I want to hear more about what those are. But when you're hiring people to build these businesses on top of an audience, so do you hire, how much do you decide to invest in them until, invest in their new, the new business until they're able to make a profit?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  You know, we have a, we're pretty patient. I mean, it depends on the business itself. If it's growing and its KPIs, then we'll continue to support it. You know, every business is different. Obviously, the real estate business has, you know, we haven't broken ground yet. So that, that is going to take many years to sort of generate a profit. It has its own sort of journey. The finance business is a finance brokerage business and it should generate profitability much quicker than some of the other projects. You know, we buy e-commerce businesses. We've now owned six e-commerce businesses.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  What are you selling?

• 41:35Speaker 01

  We own the largest NASA or the largest space merch store on the internet called the Space Store. So it's like collectibles. The aviation nerds and the space nerds are, the Venn diagram for both of them is pretty tight. So if you want, if you want like a model of a rocket or a patch from one of the missions, we, we can sell that, whether it's SpaceX or NASA.

• 41:56Sam Parr?

  And so what are some of the, like, what are you going to do with boating? Are you going to build a harbor?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  No, I don't think we'll do real estate because I think real estate is a, like, the, the arbitrage in aviation is that you're taking a piece of land that has beauty, it's a beautiful piece of land, but it's not next to a body of water to build a lakefront home. And so essentially what you're doing is you're taking this land and you're arbitraging because the runway itself is the arbitrage.

• 42:23Sam Parr?

  Right, right, right.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  The fact that pilots want to be there. And so with boating, it's not as if I could arbitrage a lakefront property or an oceanfront property.

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  Because that's already awesome.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the, the market's already priced that in accordingly. So for us, we're looking at financing. We're looking at e-commerce. We're looking at other categories that we think we can be successful. So probably won't be real estate, but it will be in other categories that we'll, we'll look at commerce.

• 42:49Sam Parr?

  You, I think you said 40 million that you've raised for this whole thing?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had raised, I mean, between, I mean, my father funded, has invested the money into, we haven't used outside capital, if you will, through a family office.

• 43:01Sam Parr?

  Of that 40, how much have you spent on acquisitions?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  No, that's been the predominance of the investment has been through M and A.

• 43:09Sam Parr?

  But you're going to do 60 million in revenue this year. I think on the tweet you said 10 or 15% profit.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  It's about to do our profit in March was 18% and we, we think we can sustain 20 and we think ultimately it's sort of like levels out around 30%.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  So you're going to do 60 million in revenue, I think you said. So that means 12 million in profit.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, remember that's a run rate number. So that's not a full, but yeah, 60 million in revenue, a little bit over 60 with 20% margins.

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  And then what do you think that would be worth?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at sort of public comps, then you're probably talking 12 to 15 times earnings. It's probably what if it was a public, our goal is to get to a billion dollars. I had no plans to sell this business. I like having cash flow. Sam, I do appreciate cash flow. So it's not just taking risk. I actually love cash flow. You know, it's funny, as a venture backed founder, you're kind of jealous. You have heard this, you've talked about this on your podcast before is you get jealous of the cash flow guys.

• 44:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  The cash flow guys get jealous of the valuation and venture and the venture guys, almost every founder that I know are super jealous of the cash flow guys because like, wait, we built this fantastically high valued business, but we don't see any of that money goes, you know, ultimately until exit. So.

• 44:27Sam Parr?

  But you, you have both at this point, but you have, so on 12 million in profit, 10 times is 120. Is, or no, sorry. You said 12 times, 12 or 15.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you can look at if it was a private trade, probably 10 times is a fair number.

• 44:42Sam Parr?

  So the business is worth at 60 million run rate, 12 million profit. I don't, I don't know if it's trailing 12 months revenue, whatever, but roughly 120 million to 180 million dollars.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yep, that's right.

• 44:53Sam Parr?

  That's what the business is worth. And you started this in 22 or 21?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  21, yeah.

• 44:59Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. Okay. And then you said, I think this is going to get to a billion in revenue by 2030. Is that what you said?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  That's our goal and we can do that through both organic and organic growth. I mean, here's the reality is there's 4,500 magazine publishers in there. And Sam, there's no exit for these guys. I mean, a lot of them are, they're either owned by large corporations, which frankly, want to divest their print products because public comps are challenging for them. Or they're, you know, family owned businesses where they've been running the business for multiple generations, or perhaps they started it 50 years ago, whatever, and they don't have it exit. And so we can go find, and we're doing a deal right now where it's a, you know, business about a name and a half revenue, um, about $600,000. And, and when you take out all the expenses, all

• 45:48Speaker 01

  the owner expenses, about $600,000 of contribution, we'll, we'll pay less than one time for that business. And so there's just not a lot of folks buying in this category. And ultimately, you're buying the audience. I mean, that's really what it's all about is yes, we own and generate profit and that's great and cash flow, but ultimately, so I like to say we're a private equity business meets venture capital because ultimately VCs want the asymmetric 100x return. We're going to incubate businesses that can potentially bring those high level returns, but using the audience which we already own. And so, I mean, e-commerce is never going to hit that mark, but you have an aircraft finance business, you have a real estate project that very well could, and we'll find other business models as we grow.

• 46:33Sam Parr?

  You're basically building a Hearst business style company. So Hearst, um, have you read The Chief, the biography of William Randolph Hearst?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 46:43Sam Parr?

  You should, man. It's awesome. So William Randolph Hearst, he, uh, he had a successful father. His successful father was a miner, I think, or like, uh, gold, gold. And in a gambling bet, he won, I think the San Francisco Chronicle. And he goes to his son and he goes, well, William, uh, you've got the Chronicle, hopefully you can make it into something. You've got a year to, to make it not lose money. And so he, uh, he does that. And he does it by creating what's called yellow journalism, which is like clickbait of the late 1800s, early 1900s. And he kicks ass and he crushes it and he starts buying another thing, another thing, another thing. He starts buying all these titles and he's killing it. He's crushing it.

• 47:27Sam Parr?

  This is like, uh, a cable business before cable where it's recurring revenue, subscriptions, massive margins. And then they Uh, they get so big, so they do a bunch of things. One, they invest in this new sports network called ESPN. So now Hearst owns something like thirty percent or forty percent or fifty percent. I forget the number of ESPN. That's they've made a billion off of that. Then they uh buy uh fit Finch ratings, I think, which is a data business, which is exactly what you're in. Uh, and they start buying all this stuff. At this point, Hearst is owned by the family. It's one of the largest family owned businesses in America. They own this massive building in right in the heart of New York City.

• 48:08Sam Parr?

  My in-laws live literally five, like I'm on my uh wife's like bedroom that she like grew up in. And I can like reach out the window and touch like the Hearst building. And I remember that was funny because I almost sold my company to them. And I was like sleeping in that room when I was visiting New York City. And uh, anyway, they own this massive building that I don't think they got a loan on. I think they own this like multi-billion dollar building. They own a ranch in like Wyoming or something like that. They own everything and it's owned by this family and it's kind of sick and it's been around for a hundred years. That's sort of what you're you're doing.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  You know, Hearst is amazing because it's ten, ten billion or twelve billion in revenue, no debt. Like, that's what's pretty astounding about a Hearst.

• 48:47Sam Parr?

  Not even on the real estate.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  They, they, they're, they're no debt. They actually have a very large venture capital portfolio.

• 48:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  They're an investor in Freightways, by the way, so that's.

• 48:57Sam Parr?

  Oh, so you know all about them. I'm, I'm, I forget who I met with there, but I learned a lot about them. But they're like older guys. They're like, they wear suits. They're like the Mad Men era where they like, you know, so it would have been a bad fit, but that's what you're building and it's awesome.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Look, I think media businesses are underappreciated. I think what's happened is the, you know, Hearst, doing Hearst is they own a bunch of newspapers as well. But I think what we're seeing now is this, if you own a strong sort of thesis around a media asset, and you can build products that take that audience, that's ultimately the playbook is like I, we have these audiences. They love the content. They're subscribing, paying for a product, which is a print magazine or a digital uh experience. They're already the audience. We can offer them products and services that they naturally would buy anyways.

• 49:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that sounds like, when you say that, I'm like, yeah, that's so obvious, but like everyone, not everyone, a lot of people have tried this. Few have succeeded. Hodenki, I think, is succeeding. There might be a couple others. But like when BuzzFeed says they're gonna do it, it's shit. It never works out. I think it doesn't work out because they have like a committee deciding on these things, whereas you could be a bit more of a, a kind of a monarch where you're like, this is what we're gonna do.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think BuzzFeed, along with a lot of other publishers, has sold out to programmatic and, and have relied upon the, the platforms, the Facebooks and the...

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  And no one really like loves them too much.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  What is BuzzFeed anyways? It's like a holistical, like, and I think the difference is that we're folk, we're buying magazines and media properties that had been around for decades. Where the audience, like, the people talk about their father or the grandfather, they, you know, reading Trains Magazine or Model Railroad or, or flying. Like, they, they, they, it has a, a lot of affinity to it. And then effectively, we just have to find services. So we make money in media, but then we have to find services that we can offer on top of that.

• 51:00Sam Parr?

  Uh, how many hours a week you working?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  No, I don't, I don't count my hours.

• 51:05Sam Parr?

  You're thinking, but like, maybe like a normal nine to five, forty hour week?

• 51:08Speaker 01

  No. I mean, I, I, I do, when I wake up at six in the morning, because my kids wake me up till midnight, I'm pretty much either with my kids or, or working on the businesses. But that's not work to me, man. Like, like, I, to me, this isn't work. These are, this is a game in some ways. I mean, I...

• 51:28Sam Parr?

  But you're still, you're in grind mode. It's not like this is all like awesome where you're like...

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I'm not sitting on a beach. Like, I, I do it to myself, too. Like, I end up getting overwhelmed, but then I'm like, I only have myself to blame.

• 51:40Sam Parr?

  What's your goal? To, you wanna be a billionaire? You wanna just do cool shit? You wanna create something that lasts for a hundred years? What's, what?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  No, I mean, one of the reasons I like media business is because you're, you're always learning something new and you get intellectually stimulated by a new challenge. It's a new audience. It's a, it's a new product. I don't know. To me, it's.

• 51:59Sam Parr?

  You don't want all the power, fame, sex and drugs that comes with owning space magazine.com.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Trains magazine is going to give me enormous amount of power. Yeah. Our model rail rider. No, it's not that at all. Um, and it's not even the wealth. It's more of the chase. It's the, it's the putting up the score in some ways of solving problems and learning about a, a different. I mean, I, we have a business that I paid $10,000 for. It's called Aeroswag. It's an e-commerce business. It, it will do $100,000 this year. That is, I spend more time on that business proportionally than any other one, just because I think it's cool. It's a print on demand T-shirt shop for, for pilots. I frankly should not be spending that much, as much time as I do, but I enjoy the, to me, it's a hobby. It's a tinkering kind of thing.

• 52:44Sam Parr?

  I bet it feels awesome to

• 52:47Sam Parr?

  make your dad regret firing you.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  It was fun proving that I could make it work, but I had a lot of that. I mean, a lot of doubters when we first started the business.

• 52:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Look, behind most successful people is a girlfriend or boyfriend that broke up with them, or a father that said no. That made like one rude comment or like, in my case, it was a, a media executive who like, he like half hazardly, like in passing was like, man, these newsletters will never make more than a million dollars a year. And like, I was like, you motherfucker.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  And you thought about that every day, right?

• 53:17Sam Parr?

  Every day. And I see this guy on sitting at floor seats at the Knicks and I'm like, you son of a bitch.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  So I would say the best thing to give a founder is an enemy. So at Freightways, I had a guy, he was, he was a CEO of our largest competitor and he really pissed me off because he told me I couldn't, couldn't compete against them. He like, I use, I like to see you try whatever products. And I, I woke up every day thinking about him, but he got fired. And I tell you, the motivation, it wasn't as fun anymore because I needed him to be the guy. All of a sudden the company became nice to me and it was like, no, I want you assholes. Like, please go back to being assholes because it's like, I wake up more, slightly more motivated every day.

• 54:01Sam Parr?

  I was like that with the founders of Morning Brew. I was like, I want to kill you. I'm like, if I see you in public, I'm, I want to like get in a fight. Now they're like my, they're family to me. They're like my best friends.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Well, you, you are doing a, you're hosting a, one of the podcasts on their platforms.

• 54:17Sam Parr?

  You know, people say, uh, uh, you know, don't, don't be hateful towards this person. And in my head, I'm like, dude, rage is like the greatest fuel ever.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  It completely.

• 54:28Sam Parr?

  I don't, you know, someone once told me, if you got hate in your heart, let it out. I'm like, no, I'm burying that deep. Let it go nowhere. That's fuel. I need that.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  But Sam, you know, it's also, it's good for the team. Because if they also have the hatred of the enemy, then they will, they'll go much further and, and fight harder than if, than if you don't.

• 54:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I love that. And it's sort of like a sport where you know, like, uh, once, once the whistle blows, you're like, anything goes. But once the game's over, like, it's like, all right, you, nothing but love, nothing but respect. But while we're in between those, the, the lines, like, we're getting after it.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:05Sam Parr?

  And so I think it's good. Uh, dude, thanks for doing this.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Yep, enjoyed it.

• 55:09Sam Parr?

  Craig Fuller, that's the pod.