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

All right, my friends, today's episode, it's special for me and it's going to 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 FreightWaves. 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 3 years into business, and the company's doing around $60 million 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, 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 want to build an audience, if you want to build a big business on top of that audience, this podcast is for you. All right. Check it out.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road like— Well, we're live. This is just how we, we just get right into it. Love it. 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 FreightWaves, 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 for that?

$65 million 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.

And then your, your latest kind of side project that is not really the size of most people's side projects is Firecrown 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 and you've built an airport and now you've, you're buying even more pieces of property, more stuff. And I think what Firecrown does, what, $50 million this year in revenue?

Yeah, $60 million run rate. So is where we'll finish this year.

So, 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?

Yeah. My father started what's now— or he sold the business last year, but it became the 5th largest trucking company in the US. And my uncle started the 8th largest— what's now the 8th largest trucking company in the US.

Were your uncle and father competitors?

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

But are they tight? Are they good family members?

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

My family is in the pro— 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 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?

Yeah, I mean, he's a blue-collar guy. I mean, he, you know, he looks 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 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, 1 to 3% margins. And so, you've got to know how to operate that business. It's an owner-operator type business. And so he certainly is an operator.

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

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 20s or early 30s, and you started, shockingly, which I can't believe you did this, day trading. And you were like, I got to build something. And so at 36, I think, or 34, you were like, I want to do almost like day trading, but for freight stuff. Is that right?

Yeah. I mean, I got fired twice, so I got fired from my father's trucking company, U.S. Express, in 2005. It was actually my older brother. Who became the CEO of US Express, that had me fired in 2005.

And then my family's a bunch of assholes, man.

Pretty much. But, um, we— 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 that to US Bank, and we were doing both fleet card processing and debit card processing, payment processing for banks.

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.

When truckers want to buy fuel, you figure 200 gallons, if they're truly topping off their tank, is they're going to fill up with, you know, $1,000 to $1,200 to $1,400.

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

No, it's for fraud management. Because what will happen is if you don't manage— I mean, think about it. You've got You know, US Press had 9,000 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 $10,000, $20,000 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 $6,000 to $8,000 of expenses per month. When you look at total what the total cost of 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, you know, all the maintenance and stuff.

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

It's about $20 million business by— in 2 years, 3 years, something like that.

How did it grow so fast?

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 in 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.

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

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.

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

Yeah, well, I had ran a business, a payments business. They fired me in 2014 because it was a tech business and tech technology businesses. Well, 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 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 that's one of the most valuable assets of the family's portfolio now. It just got a $500 million valuation last, you know, sold some stock in September of last year. So it's done well, but I've, you know, I've been out of that business for many years.

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, um, Flash and Flames. I'm pretty sure that like only maybe 10,000 people a month read Flash and 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 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?

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.

No, I had enough money to pull that off.

So with your money, do you keep a large percent in like the S&P 500 and this was just a fraction of it, or was this like a meaningful amount?

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 venture-backed 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.

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

Well, it was profitable. I mean, it was generating about $500,000 of EBITDA a year. As a standalone entity, about $2.5 million in revenue. So it was a small— this is a small business and we buy businesses at 3 to 5 times EBITDA, typically the number of these things trade at. So we're not talking about a huge— like this wasn't a huge capital outlay.

So it's like $1.5 to $2.5 million is what it was about.

You know, total purchase price is about $3.5 million when you look at cash and some deferred expenses and deferred payments. So it came out to about $3.5 million, which, you know, 7 times, 5, you know, $2.5 million upfront and $1 million deferred.

And yeah, but then you got to deal with like, to 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 and deal with these employees. Or I'd rather get to like going for walks or hikes. I don't know about this.

Well, look, I mean, I had, you know, FreightWays as 40 or if you look at total contributors that are journalists, could qualify as journalists or contributors, we have 40 to 50. So I knew 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 digital native journalists 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 they're also— there's a sense of defeatism that has existed across all publishers. And I've seen this in the multitude of acquisitions we've done, is where the editorial teams feel like 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— as 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 community. 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, 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 sort of a death circle. And so what we do is we come in, we buy them. In some ways, we liberate them from this sort of inevitable decline. And they feel really encouraged by that. You know, we upgrade the paper, we upgrade the quality, we make investments in the editorial team. You know, Flying's editorial team went from 3 folks when we bought it to 30. So you have 3 primary full-time employees and then you have contributors that are submitting an article that goes in the magazine. 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 want subject matter expertise. And typically writing is a second— 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.

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

In 2022, I think we were about $7 million in revenue, $6.5, $7 million, something like that. Oh, so you like aggressively grew it.

How? Because we invested in— so a couple of things we did was we invested in the magazine, we raised the price. The magazine was losing $7. So the magazine was taking in $8 per subscription, but it cost them $15 a month. It costs $8 a year. Was the net revenue. I know you look, you look 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, 2006, losing $7 per subscriber.

And I say, so Flying Magazine. Costs $8 a year to subscribe.

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

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

That is, that is the revenue. That's the top line number. Oh, that's stupid that you got to like losing— Sam, they were losing $7 per magazine, per subscriber per year.

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

Or 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 raise the cost of ads, but we also just subscribers basically said, look, if somebody is not willing to spend $30 or $40 a year, then they're not really— 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 million-dollar aircraft. And some of our audience is $75 to $100 million airplanes. And so you have it. You have 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 $30 or $40, they're also not going to buy advertising. Because what happened is, in the old days—

and how many subscribers?

So we, when we bought that, it was about 108,000 subscribers.

That's pretty great.

Um, we actually, when we raised the price, we raised the $30 initially, it actually went down to 32,000 subscribers.

No shit.

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

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

How much did you put in?

You know, look, we total invested about $40 million in the business, but that's not flying.

That's, that's all the acquisitions we've done and everything we've acquired at this point in the story. You've not raised outside capital?

No, no, I didn't raise— I actually had a— I had half a million dollars in from two brothers of early investors in FreightWaves that bought in. They got 15% of the business for $500,000.

So you grow it to $7.5 million and how much profit?

The business was about breakeven at $7.5 million because we were not, we were not optimizing for profitability. We were optimizing for growth.

Who'd you hire to run it?

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

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?

So I bought the land in 2021, about 1,500 acres. So originally I didn't plan on being in real estate. What we actually wanted to do was go out and build a media center connected to a runway because, 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 aviation audience, they want to see the newest aircraft being produced. And so we wanted to create a video center and connect it to an airport. The problem was that none of the airports in the community— it's 5 regional community airports around Chattanooga— were willing to sort of do anything. They said, you 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.

When you say media center, you mean?

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 it 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, look for about 50 acres. And I came across this piece of land, had 1,500 acres, and it was priced at $3.65 million. And I drove up there and it reminded me of this resort in East Tennessee called Blackberry Farm. Yeah, my wife absolutely loves it. 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.

How much did you pay for that?

$3.6 million.

Did you pay it or did you raise money?

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

This is why I'm asking these questions, because 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 grandiose 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 going to spend more of my money and build an aviation community? Like, that's like really weird and that's really ballsy. Why? What do you think you have? What's that gene inside of you that makes you think these wacky things are going to work?

Because the data, like my experience suggests that it will. But, you know, it's taking more shots on goal. Like, yeah, I got $3.5 million in an investment for a real estate project, but if it goes to zero, I still own 3.5 acres of land, right?

At the end of the day. But that's a huge project to get into because do you know anything about real estate?

No, but 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—

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

Yeah, I mean, 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 very few companies that you can sort of model your business.

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

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.

That's true. The difference, though, is when 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.

Flight.

Just 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. Uh, we advertised it. It was in January 2022. We actually took out ads in our own magazine to test the market.

What did you say in the ad?

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

But you're like, I mean, I didn't make a joke about— no, but we— I mean, like, we were very transparent about the fact this was a—

not a joke, but being lighthearted. You're like, yeah, who knows what's going to happen?

I mean, ultimately, Sam, it's about— we recruit— 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— 1,500 acres is a huge project. You're not going to do that yourself. 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.

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

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

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

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 and $3,000 per lot.

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

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, Quattro 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.

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 in that we're both like media nerds. But the way that we're different is that you're doing great with risk. Like 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 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?

Well, I like FreightWaves at some point will sell like it will sell. 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, and it's big enough that it's slightly de-risked or very de-risked.

Yeah. I mean, it's totally de-risked 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 gener— 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, particularly if I'm using my balance sheet to borrow money from the bank at frankly relatively low cost.

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

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 in to 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 FreightWaves.

Is I like— are you, are you chairman or CEO?

I'm CEO, but I— the day-to-day day-to-day functions inside that business. I have Spencer Pyland, who's 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.

So how many titles has Fire Crown acquired at this point?

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

Did you buy them in batches like you bought?

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 3 or 3.5. Basically 3 people on editorial if we were selling ads. So when I ran the company, 3 people on editorial and 37 people selling ads and managing ads and making it grow.

Yeah. And those 3 people bring all the value.

It's crazy, right? It's—

I mean, it's just how these media businesses work is you have a couple 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 3 or 4 titles that come along with it. And so we've done a, you know, maybe 2, 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 largest publisher in Sweden, the sort of the Rupert Murdoch family of Sweden. And they owned a bunch of boating titles, which we bought. Last fall. And really we own boating, yachting, sailing world, fish, saltwater sportsmen. 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, just whatever 12-year-old Craig is into. Boats, planes, RC trains.

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 its own business and makes a profit via subscriptions and advertising. Step 2 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?

Yeah, essentially. But if they're, if they're enthusiasts, if a category is big and they're enthusiastic about the category, then the answer is pretty much yes. I mean, if they're— the thing to remember about magazines, and particularly magazines that are decade-old magazines, is these things have survived potentially the great— we own 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 the content. And then ultimately they can buy another product or service.

And then is step 3 like raise prices and sell ads better? Or like, do you think about that?

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&L that's separate than the media business.

But in order to finance that, you like, these people wouldn't be selling you these businesses if they were kicking ass. But you're not being able to— 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?

That was a very good pitch. And then you, 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— to invest in their new business until they're able to make a profit?

You know, we, we have a— we're pretty patient. I mean, it depends on the business itself. If it's growing and it's hitting 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, we now own 6 e-commerce businesses.

What are you selling?

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 to, 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.

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

No, I don't think we'll do real estate because I think real estate's a real— like, 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, right? The fact that pilots want to be there. And so with boating, it's not as if I can arbitrage lakefront property or an oceanfront property because that's already awesome. Exactly. And there's 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.

I think you said $40 million that you've raised for this whole thing.

Yeah, I didn't raise— I mean, you know, between— I mean, my father funded has invested the money into. We haven't used outside capital, if you will, sort of family office.

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

Now, that's been the predominance of the investment has been through M&A.

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

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

So you can argue it's $60 million in revenue, I think you said. So that means $12 million in profit.

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

And then what do you think that would be worth?

You know, if you look at sort of public comps, you're probably talking 12 to 15 times earnings is probably what if it was a public Our goal is to get to $1 billion. I have 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. You get jealous of the cash flow guys. Yeah, 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. It goes, you know, ultimately until exit.

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

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

So the business is worth at $60 million run rate, $12 million profit. I don't know if it's trailing 12 months revenue, whatever, but roughly $120 million to $180 million. Yeah, that's right. That's what the business is worth. And you started this in '22 or '21?

'21.

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

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

I have not.

You should, man. It's awesome. So William Randolph Hearst, he had a successful father. His successful father was a miner, I think, or like 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, you've got the Chronicle. Hopefully you can make it into something. You've got a year to make it not lose money. And so 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. This is like, a cable business before cable where it's recurring revenue subscriptions, massive margins. And then they, 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 30% or 40% or 50%. I forget the number of ESPN. That's, they've made a billion off of that. Then they buy Finch Ratings, I think, which is a data business, which is exactly what you're in. 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 right in the heart of New York City. My in-laws live literally 5— like, I'm on my wife's bedroom that she grew up in, and I can reach out the window and touch the Hearst building. And I remember that was funny because I almost sold my company to them, and I was sleeping in that room when I was visiting New York City. And anyway, they own this massive building that I don't think they got a loan on. I think they own this like multibillion-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 100 years. That's sort of what you're, you're doing.

You know, Hearst is amazing because it is $10 billion or $12 billion of revenue, no debt. Like, that's what's pretty astounding about it.

Not even on the real estate.

They, they, they're, they're no debt. They actually have a very large venture capital portfolio. Yeah. They're an investor in FreightWaves, by the way.

So that's one of the reasons. Oh, so you know all about them. I met, 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.

Look, I think media businesses are underappreciated. I think what's happened is the, you know, Hearst, 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 experience. They're already the audience. We can offer them products and services that they naturally would buy anyways.

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. Uh, Hodinkee, I think is succeeding. There might be a couple others, but like when BuzzFeed says they're going to 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, uh, kind of a monarch where you're like, this is what we're going to do.

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

and no one really like loves them too much.

Uh, what is BuzzFeed anyways?

It's like, yeah, there's like a listicle, 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, and they, you know, reading Trains magazine or Model Railroader or, or flying. Like, they, they, it has 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.

Uh, how many hours a week you working?

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

You think you— but like, maybe like a normal 9-to-5, 40-hour week?

No, I mean, I, I do. When I wake up at 6 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. So you're driving to work? To me, man, like, like, I— to me, this isn't work. These are— this is a game in some ways.

I mean, you're still— you're in grind mode. It's not like this is all like, awesome.

You're like, Like, I do it to myself too. Like, I end up getting overwhelmed, but then I'm like, I only have myself to blame.

What's your goal? You want to be a billionaire? You want to just do cool shit? You want to create something that lasts for 100 years? What's— what?

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

To me, it's You don't want all the power, fame, sex, and drugs that comes with owning spacemagazine.com.

I bet it feels awesome to make your dad regret firing you.

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.

Yeah. Look, behind most successful people is a girlfriend or boyfriend that broke up with them or a father that said no. Yeah, that made like one rude comment. Or like in my case, it was a media executive who like, he like haphazardly, like in passing, was like, man, these newsletters will never make more than $1 million a year. And like, I was like, you motherfucker.

And you thought about that every day, right?

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

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 want to like get in a fight. Now they're like my— they're family to me. They're like my best friends.

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

You know, people say, you know, don't be hateful towards this person. And in my head, I'm like, dude, rage is like the greatest fuel ever. Completely. 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. That ain't going nowhere. That's fuel. I need that.

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

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

Yeah, enjoyed it.

Craig Fuller, that's the pod.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.