#98 with Ryan Begelman - How to Bootstrap Buying a Mountain

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot, but I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are gonna happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.
Shaan couldn't make it today, had some type of thing here to deal with. Okay, so this is Sam Parr. I have a guest today, his name's Ryan Begelman. We're gonna talk a little bit about who he is, and we'll get to some ideas right away.
This guy who's here, his name's Ryan.
I met him, we had a bunch of friends of friends. I met him recently, when did I meet him?
Like online, like only two weeks ago. He joined Trends and I met him there.
And I'm on this road trip right now. So right now I'm living in Utah for a week and I'm gonna live in St. Louis and then New York. And it was a coincidence that Ryan works here and lives here. And so I'm staying at his house. And so we're in this huge house that he rented out and it's lovely and we're gonna get into it. So Ryan's kind of a weirdo in the best possible sense. He's done a ton of stuff. He had this company called BizNow Media, which actually was a huge inspiration for my company, The Hustle. He started this thing called Summit Series. Then they bought this $50 mountain called Powder Mountain. And they've done a ton of other stuff and he's only 37 And he did most of this by 30 Super fascinating, all bootstrapped. Let's learn about it. So Ryan, what do you say is your story? Where did it start?

**Ryan Begelman** (1:42)
Well, I grew up outside of Washington, DC.
Went to school in the Midwest. Always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And did the typical Wall Street banking, private equity thing, worked at the Carlisle Group. It's one of the world's largest private equity firms.
And while I was there, I was looking for real estate to buy on the side. And so I started reading this little newsletter called BizNow that Mark and Elliott BizNow had founded. Mark was the father, Elliott the son. And I called outreach to Elliott the son because I was thinking, shoot, I wonder if I could buy this company or join or buy into this company. And that would help me leave Carlisle and start my journey of buying real estate and owning a cashflow positive news and media company that also had influence in the real estate world. And so I ended up striking up a relationship with Elliott and we ended up figuring out this deal where basically we would buy a big chunk of the company from his dad and we would expand the company into new markets. So his dad was in DC, we would expand it to New York and Chicago and eventually 28 Metro markets. And so I basically bought into the company and over seven and a half years, we bootstrapped the company, the 28 Metro markets becoming the largest commercial real estate publisher and conference business in North America and eventually the United Kingdom. And in 2016, I sold the company to a private equity firm. But-

**Sam Parr** (3:12)
You sold it for $50 million too, which is a pretty huge win.

**Ryan Begelman** (3:15)
Yeah, and we were profitable pretty much from the jump.
And so, I think it's a really cool story because we did it all bootstrap. Like, Elliot and I each put in about $50 at the end of 2008 So a little over $50 grand total. And over the course of seven and a half years generated over $50 million of distributions either from profits or from selling the company, not all of that we got to keep. There was a management team and others, but I think what's unique about it is that there was no venture capital, there was no lenders, no syndicate. We just did it all through profitable sales.

**Sam Parr** (3:56)
So basically, a lot of people who listen to this are hustle readers. And the reality was, I copied you guys, but for their perspective, it was like the hustle but for real estate and in different cities.

**Ryan Begelman** (4:09)
Yeah, exactly. It was an email newsletter, like super, it sounds old fashioned to make money off of email news. But the real moneymaker of the business, advertising was a small portion of it, but it was all about events. And our events were these hyper local commercial real estate events for brokers, developers, investors, lenders, architects, anyone who's interested, anyone who's doing business in commercial real estate. And what was unique about it was we could deliver an audience of 400 to 1,000 professionals every day, 300 conferences a year, almost every business day of the year, somewhere in North America. So like, maybe today we've got an event in Dallas on office buildings, and then next week we've got an event in Brooklyn, and it's about hotels in Brooklyn.