The Million-Dollar Wine Cave Business Nobody Talks About

**Bill D'Alessandro** (0:00)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Acquisitions Anonymous. This is the Internet's number 1 podcast on buying, selling and operating small businesses. I'm one of your hosts, Bill D'Alessandro, and today we have a really fun episode for you. It's me, my co-hosts, Michael Girdley, Heather Endresen, and Travis Jamieson from Capital Pad. And we have a specialty construction company that makes wine caves. Yes, wine caves, not wine cellars, but wine caves dug into the ground underneath your mansion or at your winery. So specialized construction. It has $600 plus $1,000 of SDE. It's in Sonoma County, California, kind of wine capital of the country.
So really interesting dynamics here about whether this is SBA financeable, how we might expand in this business. And we also start the episode with a fun aside from Heather about tariff refunds and how those are affecting small business acquisitions just over the past couple of weeks. So lots of fun things to dig into in this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. Acquisitions Anonymous.
Hello, another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.

**Michael Girdley** (1:06)
We don't have 100 percent beers anymore.

**Heather Endresen** (1:08)
Thumbs downing on just the Plus Inventorial.

**Michael Girdley** (1:12)
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**Bill D'Alessandro** (1:57)
All right. Are we doing a deal or are we just going to talk about AI again?

**Michael Girdley** (2:00)
Well, now I just click record. So now we're starting with the BS part of the...

**Bill D'Alessandro** (2:04)
This is the BS part of the episode. Heather, how are you doing?

**Heather Endresen** (2:08)
That's why I'm not talking.

**Michael Girdley** (2:11)
Heather, do you have an open clause yet?

**Heather Endresen** (2:13)
No, I don't. I know how embarrassing.

**Bill D'Alessandro** (2:15)
Heather is not regularly allowed to have AI in her business.

**Heather Endresen** (2:18)
That's kind of true. Like it is a little different when you're handling people's, you know, confidential information. It's a little scarier. Like we use a data room system that doesn't have hardly any open APIs.
It's all locked down.

**Bill D'Alessandro** (2:33)
Because everyone needs to be like audited. Who looked at what? When?

**Heather Endresen** (2:36)
It needs to be. Yeah, it does.

**Travis Jamieson** (2:38)
Open call was really trustworthy though. It'd be fine.

**Heather Endresen** (2:42)
I'll be fine. Just let it run loose.

**Travis Jamieson** (2:45)
Yeah, just go.

**Heather Endresen** (2:46)
Just go.

**Michael Girdley** (2:47)
It surprises me.
Basically, my whole team has access to the open call that's running on the Mac mini in front of me right now with no password, no nothing. If you're on our Slack, you can get in. Congratulations, everyone. I just told you how to hack into my entire universe, but it has access to nothing. It's totally isolated. There's nothing really that I can access that matters. But several times when my teammates are like, hey, I want to stop doing this cron job that I do every night, they're like, no, no. Michael needs to tell us it's okay. He's the boss. And I didn't train at that or nothing. It just knows I was the person that created it. So it's like loyal to me.

**Bill D'Alessandro** (3:23)
It's the pod father.

**Heather Endresen** (3:24)
It has reverence for you. That's cool.

**Michael Girdley** (3:26)
The pod father.

**Bill D'Alessandro** (3:27)
Yeah. So not necessarily related to that. I had a question for Heather, an SBA question. So if you run a small business, you may know that the tariff refunds have started coming out this week. I have a friend who got a check for $4 million of tariff refunds this week. Now, of course, he paid $11 million of tariff. So in theory, the other seven should be coming. But Heather, you tweeted the other day something I thought was really interesting is how businesses are dealing with the ad backs and the cash flow.