Bolder Business with Paul Fontanelli
Welcome to Bolder Business with Paul Fontanelli — where real entrepreneurs talk real business. Each week, Paul sits down with founders, leaders, and creative thinkers to uncover what it really takes to build something bold. From scaling Bolder Adventure Park into a multi-million-dollar brand to experimenting with new ventures, Paul shares the lessons, wins, and failures that shape the entrepreneurial journey. Whether you’re building your first idea or growing your tenth, this podcast will challenge you to think bigger, move faster, and stay bolder in business and in life.
Bolder Business with Paul Fontanelli
Ep 005: He’s Raising Millions to Make a Zig Ziglar Biopic — Here’s How
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In this episode, Duke Dennis walks us through the bold mission to bring Zig Ziglar’s story to the big screen — from securing life rights to raising capital and packaging real Hollywood talent. What starts as a lifelong dream turns into a masterclass in networking, persistence, and understanding investors.
Then the conversation shifts back to Bolder, where Paul shares the real challenges of running an early-stage business: soaring fixed costs, marketing missteps, cash-flow pressure, and the uphill battle of staying alive long enough to grow.
Two very different journeys, one shared theme: big vision demands bigger execution.
Meet Duke Dennis And The Zig Vision
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Boulder Business. Today we've got special guest, Duke Dennis. Man, he's working on an awesome project. I'm pumped to have you, Duke. Welcome. Nice to be here, Paula. A little bit of background. Duke and I met each other probably five, six years ago. I don't even know it. Pre-COVID. Pre-COVID when I was just had the idea of Boulder, trying to figure out financing options. Tell us a little bit about what your current day job is and how we met initially.
SPEAKER_00My day job is I raise money for commercial real estate projects. You and I met back when I was at a previous iteration of the firm called Metropolitan Capital Advisors. It was a boutique debt and equity placement firm specifically geared towards commercial real estate. But since then, back in April of 2020, we got acquired by a publicly traded company called Marcus and Millichap to help grow their debt and equity protocol throughout the Southeast. So that's that's what I do today. Awesome.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I met Duke, didn't the financing through him, but five years goes by. Duke reaches out to me on LinkedIn, which I love LinkedIn because you're always connected to people. It's a great way to reach people. And Duke is working on an awesome, I guess it's called a side project. Side project that's fascinating. So tell us just a little bit about that, and then obviously that's where we're going to spend most of our time today.
SPEAKER_00As it's probably tomorrow morning, I'll have the final bit of the class A shares raised. Nice. It'll be capital raised for development of a movie about the motivational speaker, Zig Ziggler. Okay. A feature-length film, not a documentary, a full feature-length film. Love it.
Zig Ziglar’s Life And Early Breakthroughs
SPEAKER_02Those are my favorite movies, by the way. When they're true stories, you know, nonfiction, about inspirational stories of people's lives, like I'm always hooked on it. So when you told me about it, one, I obviously know who Zig Ziggler is. Love is quotes, love is motivation, but just that type of storyline always interests me. How did this come to be?
SPEAKER_00I mean, a long story long. I've been listening to Ziggs since I was 15. Yeah. At that point, I was probably at a little bit of a crossroads in high school. And my dad sat me down and had a very candid talk with me. I mean, he basically said, like, hey, if you keep going down this road you're on, you're gonna end up working at Walmart for the rest of your life. And I think we know he did not mean he's like the CEO.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So after that, like I started crying. Wow. And he's like, Why are you crying? He's he's a Marines who's not super emotional. Yeah. Uh, but he's like, Why are you crying? I said, Because my dad thinks I'm a loser. And he said, No, I don't think you're a loser. You think you're a loser. And that's why you're living up to these low expectations for yourself. Brilliant. What followed was like a two and a half hour conversation, ended around midnight, where he went to work breaking down why it's important to have goals and positive beliefs and positive motivation and a plan to go achieve those goals. And a practical step that he took after that was every weekend we started playing golf. I grew up in a town of about 1,500 people. So we had like a nine-hole golf course. Okay. Instead of going to that nine-hole golf course, which was 10 minutes away, my dad would either drive us to college station or Waco, which is roughly an hour in either direction. But on the hour-long drive there and on the hour-long drive back, we'd listen to Zig Ziggler. And so he just started brainwashing me. That's incredible. That's like life-changing parenting. Within that span of time, I wrote down a list of goals. One of them was to write and produce 10 movies, and I wrote down the movies I wanted to make, and one of them was Zig. So now I'm here actually doing it. It's been a goal for your whole life, for 20 years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for 20 years. Oh, that's incredible. I know who Zig Ziggler is, but for those that might not, tell us a little bit about him, you know, the background.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, he's he's a southern guy. He was born in Mississippi, Yazoo City, Mississippi, and grew up to be a traveling salesman, you know, sold cookware, sold anything you can imagine under the sun, but across the southeast, southwest United States. And eventually, you know, the progression in sales typically you become a salesperson. Then if you do really well at that, you become effectively a sales trainer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And he started giving speaking engagements and developed a following of people who wanted to hire him, like Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics. That was his first big presentation. And she ended up hiring him after she saw his speech and said, I want you to go around to all of my offices. And she had, you know, at least a national platform at that time, if not an international, you know, makeup company, and said, Hey, I'm gonna buy effectively all of your first run of your books. Because at that time he was trying to get his book published. But in that day and age, if a publisher didn't pay you or buy your first run, you know, it was really expensive out of pocket. And so he self-published his first book, like 5,000 copies with his own money, and was driving around giving these speeches and selling his book out of his the back of his car. And then Mary Kay heard of him, saw him, and loved it so much, she said, I'm gonna hire you and we're gonna buy all these books, but you have to go to each of my offices and give your speech and hand these books out. And that set him off on really an incredibly successful speaking career. That, you know, that was about this part in his mid-40s, you know, up until his, you know, in his 80s, he was giving speeches when he passed away. But he's written 30 plus books, translated into 40 plus languages. So he's truly international at this point. He was also a devout Baptist, which is a huge part of his speech, which is inspiring people to find faith. And you know, that really does ring true down here in the South. Wow. Now the Mary Case story, roughly what year would that have been?
Choosing A Story Arc For The Film
SPEAKER_02Gonna guess it was in that like mid 80s, okay, maybe early 80s. The timeline of your movie is it gonna be his whole life or is it gonna be more a piece of it? Like I think about Selma, the movie about Martin Luther King Jr., they just dialed into that one event of his life as opposed to the whole life story. Like, do you have kind of a thought on how you're gonna tell the story?
SPEAKER_00So just this past Monday, we met with a professional writer. I'm hopefully gonna co-write it with them just because I know the subject matter. Absolutely. But I guess that you could go the, you know, you cover 30, 40 years similar to what they did in the Reagan movie. Yep. I was not a super big fan of that type of story to leave here. Well, really, you're just jumping from this year to this year to this year, and you you never really feel like you have a foundation, right? Like a scene or a setting. So I kind of like it similar to what you're saying, where there is kind of a specific episode or thing he's trying to overcome. Yes. And so it's probably going to be something along those lines, but I have a separate idea where it could be in the vein of inspired by, where you take elements from his speeches and things he tried to impress upon people. And my hope would be that we develop a story around a new salesman that he's hired to train and seeing that person go through the struggles of learning how to sell, kind of getting their first bit of money, getting their first big check, and then realizing that they can really change their life through sales. Okay. There's hopefully more beyond just the sales. Like if you're in sales for a period of time, I think you realize there's more than just that next commission, the next check, hopefully. Yeah. But hopefully that's the storyline we'd tell. At least that's that's what I'm thinking of right now. Right on.
SPEAKER_02Great background on Zig there. I'm a huge Zig Ziggler fan, just based on motivational quotes. You know, part of this podcast I talk about is I'll do little quotes and then we'll talk about it. So we're gonna have Profum. Shoot us two or three Zig Ziggler quotes, start at the top.
SPEAKER_00If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. All right, it's so funny, just the the aspect there. He talks about having goals. Yep. If you were gonna go on a road trip starting in Grand Prairie, where are you gonna go? You can't say I don't know exactly. You're just gonna end up, you don't know where. Yeah. But a lot of times also, if you don't have a goal or a place you're trying to get to or something you're trying to accomplish, you're either spinning your wheels or you just never start out of pure hesitation. Absolutely.
Three Zig Quotes And Why They Work
SPEAKER_02Which is a great team to the next one. There's a quote from Zig just about getting started. You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. That's it. And that's kind of what I started with this podcast. I was just like, well, it's not ready yet. Obviously, we're still under construction here, but it's not gonna be great right when you start. But you can't become great if you don't start. And to your point, if you don't even have a plan of where to start, it's just gonna spin in circles. And then probably the most famous one, we don't even need prophet to read it. You already told it to me earlier, Duke. Zig's most famous quote is what?
SPEAKER_00It's probably you can have everything in life you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want. I love it. You know, be there to serve.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's right. And that's absolutely right. If you're constantly there for other people and lifting them up and helping them get what they want in return, you know, the goals you have are going to be hit as well. So that's awesome. Love those motivational quotes. Let's now go into the business side of this. So you reached out to me because obviously, when I came to you four or five years ago, I was seeking capital, trying to finance the project. I had to go through a lot of equity raising. And so you're in the process of equity raise. You mentioned at the kickoff of this that you're about to finish your A series. For what you're able to share, talk a little bit about the capital side. You know, funding a movie is fascinating.
SPEAKER_00It's almost like a startup business of its own. Each each film is effectively like a startup. And so my day job is commercial real estate. Since the advent of COVID, I've noticed that there's been a degradation in Hollywood and people not wanting to film out there. And so I've been actually networking with film studio owners who want to develop here in Texas. Yep. And so trying to use my day job to one, help them get financing, but two, to build out a network for when I have a script or something to be made, I have somebody to call.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
Film As A Startup: Capital And Team
SPEAKER_00So that's where it kind of started, you know, four or five years ago now. But through that, I was meeting with the Fort Worth Film Commissioner, the former Fort Worth Film Commissioner, and she suggested to have coffee with her now husband, a guy named Houston Hill. Okay. He's a local producer, lives in Arlington. And we sat down to coffee and I said, What's your next thing? He's like, Well, I'm working on this and that. Do you have any ideas? And I brought up a TV pilot I wrote called Brokers about commercial real estate. I want it to be like entourage, yeah, commercial real estate. And he said, You know, I'm I've really just done movies. I don't feel comfortable going to it's a whole different financing mechanism. Then I said, Well, what about Zig Ziggler? He was like, You won't believe this, but my dad used to take me to see Zig when I was a kid. Has anybody done anything on it? I said, Well, there's a documentary on Amazon, but it's a documentary. It's not an autobiographical or it's not a it's not a full feature-length film where actors are depicting him. And so he said, Well, if you can get a meeting with the family, like I'll join you for that and we'll do this 50-50. And so that gave me the confidence in the idea. You can always have an idea on your own or in your hand, but to have a real producer who's done eight or nine movies at at this point, with you know, he's he's produced movies with Scott Eastwood, Clint Eastwood's son, with Martin Sheen, with Luke Wilson. Brilliant. You know, his latest movie called You Gotta Believe, you know, we had a big uh premiere over in Fort Worth in downtown Fort Worth, and he just sold it to Netflix. You know, he's he's a real guy doing real things and have that kind of validation just for the idea. And to go back to Zeke's quotes, like he pointed me in the direction, he said, Go get this, go get go get a meeting, and we'll talk about the life rights. Yeah, I'm a commercial real estate, you know, debt and equity broker. Getting in front of people is not that hard. In the beginning, it was probably a bit scary, you know, years ago. But now, you know, picking up a phone, finding a phone number, or just walking in. Yep, that's what we're tasked with doing is getting in front of people. That's true. So I I called and emailed and kept calling and kept emailing. It probably took really a month to get the attention of Tom Ziegler, the son. Okay. And how did you do that? Because I mean, today you reach people so many different ways. How did you actually make that connection? When I moved to Dallas after grad school, back when we were a private company, our office was about a mile down the road from the old Ziegler headquarters. Okay. So I'd visited once or twice just to pop in and see it because I was such a fan of Yeah. And so I knew that they were local. And also just reading his life story. He spent the last probably half of his life in North Texas in the Plano area. So I knew I knew the family was relatively close. The company is still going today. They're still doing sales training and motivational speaking. Yep. So I knew it was geographically close by. I didn't just pop in. I tried to go through the proper channels of calling and emailing, but I think I direct messaged Tom and a couple executives on LinkedIn, which has been fruitful in the past. Sure. I called the main line and said, you know, I want to talk about a movie. And whenever you do that, people are generally open to having a discussion. Yeah. So I spoke with Lori Majors, who's the executive assistant for Zig for like four decades, and she set up uh an interaction with Tom via email, and I just kept following up. Fascinating. There's a few takeaways I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_02One, the credibility that you were able to build through the connections that you've made in your career, then getting in touch with what was the producer's name again? Houston Hill. Houston Hill obviously then gives you credibility of like he's made movies, he's done that, and then you've got the just the tenacity to keep reaching out to the family. You didn't you weren't successful the first reach out, you just kept going with it. I mean, that's there's so many key takeaways that things don't just happen automatically. You have to put yourself in the right place, the right thing, and then you know, stay consistent with it until you can get that meeting. So tell us about when you first get that meeting. How did that go? Give us a little bit of insights into that.
Winning Life Rights And Early Investors
SPEAKER_00I mean, at first it was set up to be a Zoom call. Okay. Strangely enough, maybe the morning prior to it or the day prior, a friend of mine is helping a salesperson or sales lady write her own life story. And my friend asked me to help co-write that. Okay. It turns out this lady was the head of sales for Zig for like 14 years, starting back in 1994. And my co-writer friend mentioned, hey, this guy's trying to do something with Zig, you know, you should talk to him. Her name's Mary McKay. Yeah. And I don't know if this happened, but I think this happened. I spoke with Mary and she said, I think that's a brilliant idea. I'm going to call Tom and tell him he needs to work with you. I so I haven't confirmed with Tom, but she said that and she's a lady of her word. So in any event, I feel like that happened because when we did get on the Zoom call, it was me, Houston, and Tom. Mary actually said that he was probably going to be a little hesitant to talk about it, as I would expect anybody would be when you're talking about subject matters your father. Yes. Um, especially such a well-known and positive figure like Zig. Yep. But he seemed just really open from the get-go. So, you know, whether the stars aligned or Mary really did put in a good word, yeah, you know, they were open to it. And so we had a great probably 45-minute long call. And it wasn't just about Zig, but it was also getting to know him because really, when you're talking about real life subject matter, we're gonna have to come back and interview him, interview his sisters, interview people who knew Zig. And so being respectful and having a real relationship with those people, not just using them for a story smart, you know, like TMZ or something like that, you know, not just the gacha media, you know, the paparazzi. Yeah, you have to really go about it in a thoughtful manner. And also, I genuinely love Zig Ziglar. So it's great to meet him, you know, in general. So, you know, just bringing that enthusiasm. I think he picked up on some of that that we are sincere in our intent. This is so fascinating.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so you've got the producer, you've got obviously your ability to help write the story, tell the story. You're now connected to Tom, the family, talking about the life rights. Now talk us through like the business side of producing a movie, then eventually distributing a movie. You talked about Keyson's previous experience selling a movie to Netflix. Like just talk us through the business model, if you will, at whatever level you can at this point.
Revenue Streams: Theaters, Streaming, DVD
SPEAKER_00I'll start with like the capital sack and the fundraising. Yeah, that's where we are. There's really two sequences that need to occur. And the first one is, and this is the way Houston prefers to do it. There's a couple of different ways you can. Sure. We're raising about you know a quarter of a million dollars. That'll be in the class A. There is a waterfall with that to relate it to commercial real estate, because that's my background. That's like the pre-development money, okay, which is it is speculative in nature. So there's expected higher return with that. I called it the seed round. The seed round. Yeah. And that's gonna go towards you know, doing these things of getting control of the intellectual property. So having the attorneys come in here and negotiating the documents with the family to relate to real estate, that's like getting your site under control. Okay. You know, this is where it's gonna be, this is what it's gonna be about. That's gonna be towards getting the script written, which is like your plans and your specs. So you know, okay, this is the building, this is the house, or this is uh you know the retail property. Perfect story, yeah. And then getting, you know, casting agent on board who's gonna start talking to talent. So we have actors with us as well as a director. And so with that, you've created what is the package. And so again, relating to real estate, that's you know, the the director and the casting agent are almost like your general contractor and your subcontractors. Yep, these are the people who are gonna build this thing together. And so that's my analogy for it, which has actually helped because I've raised some money from some real estate people, so relating it in a language they know to speak about the investors, something that's fortuitous that happened. I'm currently raising debt for a construction project, it's an industrial development out in Haltham City. And the sponsor on that is raising equity outside of me. I'm just handling the debt portion. Yep. But they're doing also a larger fund aside from this. But this project will go into the fund. And when they were raising equity for the fund, you know, they said they spoke to one investor, and when they talked about the team, they mentioned my name is the guy who's getting debt, the debt broker. And the equity investor said, Oh, I know that guy. That's that movie guy. And happened to be this guy, and I'll not gonna say his last name, but Adam, his first name. And I said, Oh, it's been a couple few years. Yeah, I should reconnect with Adam. So I sent him an email with the deck and for Zig, and he replied in five seconds with pictures of Zig in the body of the email saying these were taken at the lake house that I bought. It was Zig's lake house, and this is me getting to meet him and having him like tool me through the house when I was buying it. So he said, I know Zig, I love Zig. You know, I'm available whenever you and your partner are ready to meet. I'm interested. And so that happened, I think middle December. Yep. We had you know like a 20-minute phone call. And he's a business guy himself, he's an oil and gas, so he has some you know finance acumen and he's savvy, but also he's an oil and gas, which is a pretty risky profile in terms of investor. So you wouldn't be surprised to hear that a lot of oil and gas guys do end up investing in movies. And he said yes. Wow. And then two days later, there's a family office guy in Fort Worth who I've done some financing work for in the past. You know, I brought this up to him because I know he's he's of faith and that's very important for him. And so I brought up this, you know, motivational speaker who's a devout Baptist, who's big at Prestonwood Baptist back when he was alive. And he said, I'm interested. Let me make sure it's cool with my wife, but I'm I'm very interested. Yeah. And then he said he's in. And then a friend of mine who I play golf with every single week, who's in the commercial real estate business, he's from Jackson, Mississippi. His father's a real estate developer. I've known his dad for 10 years, because it turns out the previous iteration of the firm, he was a client of that firm, and I'd worked on a couple of his deals as an analyst. And so I had kind of known him, but never met him before. And then just completely randomly, his son moves to Dallas to work in commercial real estate, and he and I just become good friends. Yeah. And he's a he's a southern guy, he likes to play golf. You know, we have that in common. And we had breakfast one day when the dad came down. He's like, What are you working on? And you know, you almost have to be shameless in your pitching. 100%. You know, you just have to believe in it that much. Yeah. Um, but I brought up Zig Ziggler and he's like, I know Zig because he knew all the backstory because everybody in Mississippi knows who Zig is. Wow. It's it's one of, I don't know, call it the shining stars of the state, you know, historically speaking. Totally. And so people still talk about him, people are still impacted by him. So, you know, over I think it was actually on my birthday, December 20th, my buddy you know, shoots me an email with Big Ben, his dad. He says, Uh, Duke, uh, I think Big Ben's got a present for you. Oh, really? And then he replies, and I think I'll give you some money for that movie. So in a couple of weeks, we had, you know, three quarters, you know, or most of the money come in. Yep. And then just last week there was a retail conference, uh, retail development and leasing down here in Dallas. And I generally don't set meetings, I just kind of float, but I talk to anybody within arm's reach of me. So I just naturally set up meetings or I naturally get people's information and exchange information. So I was standing at our booth and friends just kept walking by saying, What are you working on? And you know, we talked about a couple of deals, but I always end with, and I got this crazy Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's it probably is the best part of the conversation. It was, it was, I mean, yeah, the so there were there were two or three friends that I pumped into and they all just lit up. They're like, Man, especially this one guy, Peter, like he was like one of my best friends since I'm like nine. You know, he in our friend group, every year he'll start up January with like email or text or something where it says gotta get down your goals with a zigziggler quote. And he just has been priming us with you know positive, you know, kind of quotes and aspirations for 30 plus years at this point. And he was like, Don't sell that last unit. He said, Hold that for me, which is massive buy-in. Yeah, and it feels really good to think again, it just feels validating for the fact that you know, this idea, if it can get money, it's on that path. Oh, absolutely. So we're having a follow-up call with Houston to meet Peter and another guy tomorrow morning, but the other guy is also a client of mine, and he said, or you know, he texts me, send me the docs. I'm in. So yeah, you know, we're probably gonna start calling the capital and getting in the bank to start, you know, paying for the attorney and paying the screenwriter in the next 30 days. That's amazing. This is all the pre-development.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's just the pre-development. So what I heard is obviously your network throughout your career plays a critical role in it. And then obviously Zig's notoriety reach just makes that connection, the credibility there as well. I will tell you, that's just awesome to hear how you were able to raise it. Raising money is very difficult. You made that sound really easy. It ain't that easy, but what's going to be awesome for you is now that you're gonna have that A shares and do the pre-development, like you said, once you start getting more and more to it, it just becomes more credible, is the word I keep coming back to. Talk us through now, just at a high level, what are the different phases of capital you need to go through to get this to the screen? I mean, there's really two.
How To Get Involved And Contact Duke
SPEAKER_00So there's the the A share we talked about, that is the pre-development that's getting kind of and that was in total about how much? About a quarter of a million dollars. And then so once you have that package, you then go towards production financing and the class B raise, which would probably be about a million, million and a half dollars for the class B, and then uh some kind of bank loan for probably 50 to 60 percent of the budget, which we think the total movie would probably cost somewhere between five and ten million dollars. Yeah. It's you know, it's not a big special effects driven kind of from when that happens, when that money comes in, that's the actual production financing and production capital. So that means we're actually making and filming the movie. Okay. And then we're editing it, we're getting sound involved, we're getting music in there, and also the marketing. So those are effectively the two capital points and the two lines of demarcation for this is what we're doing here, the plans of specs, this is the actual call-up building of the building, or this is the you know, the development of the project, this is where it gets done and recorded. And then you have distribution, which at that point, then you have a handful of streams of income that could occur to bring in revenue to make it a profitable venture. You know, the first one that probably everybody thinks about or used to think about, it's probably aging out now, but it's theatrical release. So actually getting into theaters and having you know theater agreements where you're they're taking some percentage to effectively house or market your thing and have it to be viewed in their, you know, the AMC in the movie theaters. So that's one reason.
SPEAKER_02So my understanding of that is if AMC releases a movie, they get 50% of ticket sales and then the movie gets 50%, roughly speaking. Is that right?
Boulder’s Origin Story And Risk
SPEAKER_00Right speaking. Okay, but that can be negotiated, is what you're saying. Got it. So there's the actual release, which is one revenue stream, then there's streaming now. Yeah. So you have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and the fact that there's actually already content via the documentary about C that bodes really well for the ability to then sell the movie. Yep. So we're very hopeful that I'll do well there. And then usually those agreements can be one, two, five years, something like that, with a streaming service. But then at the end of that term, you get the material back and then you can go shop it around and sell it to one of the other streaming services and have another two to three to five year kind of run with them, but have another check come in for the content. So we talked about theatrical, we've talked about streaming, and you know, something that isn't talked about is DVD sales because the majority of the country still lives in rural areas. Okay. And so Walmart, as an example, my partner sold his last movie, The DVD rights, you know, with Walmart. There's still people buying yeah DVDs, and especially uh Walmart caters to typically blue collar, Christian rural areas, which is exactly the kind of the demographic that you know Zeke came from, but also that we're seeking to get connected with.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, that's three revenue streams there, you know, that that just keep going. And then there's Tubi, which is like four pay, you know, similar. You can have it on YouTube where again you just pay you know$2.99 or$3.99. They put an ad in front of it. Yep. And so, you know, there's a handful of revenue streams to do with that. The other thing with it is we hope it to be like evergreen content because you know, positive speaking, motivational aspect that never goes away. I'm still listening to Zig Sigler, I'm still listening to Earl Nightingale, I'm still listening to Think and Grow Rich and Napoleon. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which was written a hundred years ago. Yeah. So, like the you know, the the truth is what it is, and if it works, it works. And so the hope is to create some kind of story that is inspirational that people continue to share with their friends, their family, and pass down through their generations to positively impact their lives. Like for me personally, this is just a means to say thank you to Z.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's amazing. Awesome, Duke. Let's kind of transition now. Assuming you're gonna need to do additional raises in the future. If somebody's interested to listen to the podcast, like, wow, like I hope it's still available. Obviously, the A series probably is gonna be closed. How would they reach out to you? What's kind of a good way to connect if they are interested?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if they want to reach out to me, I mean, call me on my cell 979-7779. He's going right at it. And then uh find me on LinkedIn, okay, you know, Duke Dennis, but also my work email is duke.dennis at marcusmillichap.com. Yeah, reach out to me. I'm more than happy to have a conversation. Okay. I love it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we wish you the best. I'm super intrigued by it. I definitely want to uh stay up to date on the story. Let's transition now. I think when we kick this off, as I said, you and I got to know each other five years ago. You said you even had some questions about how things are going. I just wanted to kind of see what's on your mind.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, I'm curious what inspired this. You know, was it you had kids and they were on a jungle gym, you know, this is a public space, but you know, it's all metal bars, it's rusty, it could be nicer, newer, cleaner, and or just a safe family environment. I'm curious what sparked the idea initially and then how you built upon that. You know, like for me, Zig, like I had the idea after listening to him for so long, and I just start writing, you know, an idea of a scene, an idea of a story. And so it just kind of, you know, you write it into existence. What happened for you that made you think this? And then how did you build on that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I have three kids, to your point. We go to family entertainment centers and we're here at the Epic, right across the streets, epic waters. So going to those places, I always have a fun time. I still act like a kid when I go there. I have fun with my kids. At the time, I was working at Fidelity Investments, doing the corporate ladder, and was just ready to do something different. I watched Gary Vaynerchuk a lot and he talks about, you know, work from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. on your side job, and which is exactly what you're doing right now. And so I just started thinking, like, okay, what would I want that to be? I knew I wanted to start a business, but I didn't know what kind of business. I knew I didn't want it to be in finance, I wanted to do something totally different. And then, you know, six flags or something one day, I was just like, man, I should look into an entertainment type venue, obviously not the size of six flags, but then it started saying, well, they can do well as businesses if they're unique and different. The idea of what would make it different, trying to give you a very high-level overview. But I went to a uh corporate trip in Salt Lake City, up in Park City, actually, and they had the adventure course that they converted from the old Olympic ski jump area. You can ride a tubing slide down the ski jump area, and you can go on zip lines, all that. I just was like, wow, this is different. This is unique. How do we build something like this in Texas where there's no mountains? And then we had the idea of the dome, and it just started building on itself of just new, creative, different things. And then uh yeah, it took about five years from the idea to opening day, but that was kind of the start of it. It was just create something different, fun, and you know, have my kids be a part of it as well.
Budget Reality: Debt, Interest, And Marketing
SPEAKER_00I can hear Dave Ramsey in the back of my head. Yeah. Like, what was your financial plan? You know, did you have six months of savings or or more? This is the big venture. At what point were you like, I think this is viable? Yep. And then separately, did you have a conversation with your family? Did you bring your kids in and be like, hey, we're gonna try to do this, but I need your buy-in too, you know, like I guess the support system is huge. So I'm curious about all that stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, that definitely takes planning. And so we built up savings at the time and plan for, okay, I think it was about a year of moonlighting it and putting our own money into it. Like the first hundred thousand is what we put into it. And then once we got to your point, like a little bit of the development specs, a little bit of that going, hired consultants to give me the credibility. There became the point where I have to actually raise money working at Fidelity Investments. You can't raise money from your clients. Well, not just from your clients, like you can't do a private equity raise while working at Fidelity because of licenses and all that. So it became the point of if I'm gonna raise money, I have to leave. And so that was May of 2019, is when I left. Being naive, I was like, oh, we'll break ground in June. Yeah, we broke ground like two years later. And so it definitely goes slower than I thought by all means. You know, to say, did we have six months of savings? And we probably had more than that, but I mean, I went without a salary for four years, it ended up being, which I think was originally planned to be six months. So it got tough. It's still tough. I mean, it's still very tough. So one of the main reasons I wanted to start the podcast is just another element of marketing, storytelling, which obviously is critical because Boulder's still not profitable yet. Like we're still in that I call it the toddler phase of business where we're trying to figure out how to get the right number of people through the doors and manage costs and all of that. So we're still struggling in in certain aspects of it. And then the hope is obviously telling a story, get people aware of it. I'll be sharing finances in the next episode we're about to shoot today is just giving a business overview of how things are going. And just like you were, you were very upfront about hey, here's the money I'm trying to raise, here's my phone number. Like being open and vulnerable in my mind is like the best way to share things because it's it's honest, it's true. I'm not sure I'm answering your question anymore at this point, but it's really been a journey to say this.
SPEAKER_00Well, like when you were at the previous company, Fidelity, like, you know, was there a day where you were sitting at your desk? You're like, I need to get out of here. Like this is killing me spiritually, killing me emotionally. Oh, yeah. Like my first real job in commercial real estate in Dallas, I was an appraiser. Yep. And I just remember one day, like I woke up and I was like, I'm having a hard time getting out of bed. And I've never had a difficult time waking up and getting going. And I had a conversation with my dad where again, everything goes back to my dad's okay. You know, appraisal is a very safe, kind of secure job in terms of the income. That's why my dad kind of pushed me to that. But I remember telling him, like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. I think I'm gonna go into you know, dead equity brokerage, you know, commission. My dad worked for the government his whole life. And so he always had kind of a steady paycheck and just comes from a more conservative background. So I remember telling him that and he's like, I think you're making a mistake. And it was the first time probably I had to diverge from this person who I completely trust, yeah, his opinion. And it was the best thing ever. But like, did you have to have that talk with yourself? Or is that something I don't know again? Like, I go to the Relationship you have with your wife? Like, is it you were saying it out loud and she's like, Honey, I hear you saying this. Are you feeling that? Or you know, how did you have that realization? Were you at your desk or were you at home? Or it was all the above.
Audience Data, Influencers, And Reach
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think everybody can relate to not checking out, but having that kind of aspiration to do something different. For me, it was I was no longer fulfilled in the job I was doing. The pay was great, the income was good, but day to day, it was just like, man, I'm just not motivated. It's very cheesy. We only have one life to live. And it's like, is this really what I want to do for the next 20, 30 years? Not at all. And so we built up enough savings. My wife at the time was very supportive of what we were doing. And it just came down to it's a risk, and I'm probably more comfortable with risk than most. Now, even though I mentioned like Boulder's struggling, like we are really having a hard time right now, specifically on cash flow and all of that. I wouldn't change it for the world because I wake up every day and it's just I was up till 4 a.m. yesterday, last night working. You know, eyes are a little tired this morning, preparing for a board meeting tomorrow, but I love it. And we're here shooting a podcast as part of the job. You know, I'll shoot videos in the park or we'll have team meetings and I'll be up on the course running things. Like my day is so different every day. There's always things going on that it's just so much more fulfilling, rewarding. I mean, we see people come into the park and their eyes widen and they're having a good time, and you get five-star Google reviews that you know, the head of mage, it makes it all worth it. But for me, it just comes down to I'm doing what I want to be doing and I'm loving it, but the struggle is real. I mean, it's running a business, especially the size that we are right out of the gate, is definitely tough.
SPEAKER_00For you, is it the revenue side? Is it the expense side? And you know, we talk about this in the business like pro forma. Yeah. What did that look like compared to what is actual today and why is why what is the difference or what is the gap that you're experiencing?
SPEAKER_02I think it's mostly revenue. I guess I'll start with expenses, then I'll jump to revenue. Expenses are very high fixed cost. So the debt that we were able to get, you'll definitely relate to this, was a variable interest rate loan because it was a startup, higher risk. So the bank was willing to take it at a variable interest. So we was it SBA or was it? SBA. It was a 504 SBA. And the the first lien holder, amazing, Plain State Bank, shout out to them. They're a phenomenal business partner of ours, but it was a variable interest rate loan. And so when we first not signed the deal, but when we first kind of started the construction, it was going to be four and three quarters or something. And that's yesterday. Now we're at that's we got to ten and a half at one point. So our debt service is almost double what it was pro forma to be at. And that is a very big loan. So when you're carrying double the debt service you budgeted, significant overhead expense that you know, obviously we weren't planning for. Insurance is very expensive because our dome, we didn't foresee that. So insurance is a big expense. So we have some really large fixed costs that we don't have much control over. So the answer is we have to grow top line revenue. We budgeted about$10 million for annual revenue. Year one, we came in at seven and a half. I was gonna say that's that's not horrible. Well, for a startup, correct. You're you're 75% of the way there. There you go. And we dipped in year two to seven, but there's a marketing mishap that we did. We changed some things, came off Facebook for a little bit, and it had a big negative impact. Really? Yeah. And so we went from roughly two million impressions a month on Facebook, Meta, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, about two million a month. We dropped down to 300,000. The agency we took on just was changing things, thought Facebook wasn't yielding when in reality it was. And that cost us about a half million dollars. And that's what I'm gonna do the business review after this, show all the charts and graphs of that. But luckily, we reacted relatively quick and we're starting to trend back. But it is top line revenue. We've got to just grow the awareness more. We've got to get more people through the door. Groups are a huge opportunity for us. You know, corporate groups coming in, having a good time in the park when otherwise we're closed is just great opportunity. So I'm very optimistic still, but you know, we're definitely feeling the heat of just making sure we we keep things going.
SPEAKER_00Do you keep like infographics about where people are coming from? Like you hear about those things like anytime a transaction occurs, this business can tell from the zip code of the credit card where that person physically came from. Are you seeing foot traffic from outside of ZFW?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, for sure. Now, I don't have like every single person, but what we do, we can pull cell phone data, obviously, through certain providers, but the best thing we have is a waiver. So when people come in, they have to sign the waiver, obviously, but we get their phone number, their email, their zip code. And so I can pull all, we have basically 150,000 waivers that have been completed, and I can pull all the zip codes. And so you can see who your primary zip codes are, et cetera. But we have people travel from all over the country. In large part, one of our largest investors, which is a whole nother story, are celebrity YouTubers. Really? Yeah. Unspeakable Preston ended up investing with us, and Unspeakable came down right when we opened. It was like, I opened a theme park, and that video went like 10 million views. Dude Perfect come back. I tried, and I haven't had Dude Perfect yet, uh, but I tried. I actually pitched them long, long time. I did. That's a funny story. But Unspeakable made such a good video, he made two or three after it that we still to this day get phone calls about hey, is Unspeakable at the park? And kids flying in. Parents tell me that their kids wanted to come here for their birthday from Chicago or Florida. So that helped a lot. Shout out to Nathan and Preston. Nathan, particularly, has really been super helpful for us.
Paid Vs Organic Marketing Playbook
SPEAKER_00Driving more revenue, what strategies are you undertaking? Because there is TikTok was going to go away two weeks ago. That's a scary thing for not only the people who make an individual living, but the businesses. And also, like you said, you know, you listen to Gary Bader, Chuck. I've been listening to him for 10 years at this point. So seeing what he said kind of come to fruition in terms of this is where eyeballs are, yep, you know, and then something like that going away. Like, Ace, what are alternative ways of marketing outside of the digital age that we're currently at? Like, yeah, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_02The three things we're doing in 25 to try to help improve things. One is we're evolving our ticketing system. So we're seeing a lot of web traffic come in, but then not convert to tickets. Our ticketing platform currently is a little bit confusing to book, things like that. So we've hired a new company to come in and revamp the website, revamp the ticketing, make it a little bit easier to purchase tickets. So hopefully, if our conversion rate goes up just a little bit, that'll have a big impact on the bottom line. Then from marketing perspective, there's paid and there's organic, right? So paid, we've got now a new agency helping us called Marketing 360, and they have a lot more analytics, a lot more resources. We've already seen Cody's our associate there, phenomenal support from them. And he's getting our impressions back up where they need to be. He's more creative on the ads. Because with paid, not only do you have to know, I call it what buttons to push, who to reach out to, and how to set it up in like Facebook as an example, but the creative's got to be good. Because if you set up the perfect campaign, but the creative's not good, Facebook's gonna charge you more because you have to serve it to a hundred people to get two people to click on it. That's gonna cost you more than if I serve it to a hundred people and 30 click on it. If it's an ad that's more engaging, your cost is lower, your CPM is gonna be lower. So we've got to be good with the creative, which is gonna help you a lot. When you're promoting Zig Ziggler's movie, like you're gonna use Zig quotes and things like that. They're gonna get tons of engagement. Your cost to add will be much lower.
Capacity, Groups, And Off-Peak Strategy
SPEAKER_00So circle back to Zig real quick. So you're asking about the business side. Yeah. Second meeting we had with the family, my partner, Houston, drove the ship and was asking, hey, who are groups we can partner with? One that came up was like FFA, like Future Farmers of America. Because Zig back in the day used to go give speeches to future farmers of America. And like I learned this through trying to find investors, Evelyn Christian University back in the 80s, they made it a required course for any freshman to take like a Zig Ziggler class. Wow. So there's, I don't know if that's still going. I'm trying to get in touch with AC to figure out, but that's potentially, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people who have been exposed to Zig because of the university. And so the marketing side, I didn't realize was so big. You know, I've been listening to Zig forever in my mind, you know, he's just fixed in there. But realizing that, okay, there's Future Farmers of America, there's you talk about Facebook at its peak post his death, after Zig died, they had over half a billion impressions in an annual time frame on his Facebook page. Yeah. So the number of people viewing him consistently, even after he died, is you know, it's a relevant figure. And so you know, we're gonna be able to work with the family to utilize the Facebook to show the previews and the commercials for the movie. There's a YouTuber, Evan Carmichael, who's oh, yeah, yeah. I've heard of him. The the family, the Ziegler family, gives him speeches that were never previously publicly released of Zig so that he can host them on his channel. And they've said we're more than happy to reach out to him to talk about a partnership to get marketing out on this. So I didn't realize at the time, because I wasn't, again, this is a thank you letter to Zigg. I didn't realize the business aspects and how we need to pay attention to that to get the word out there. But there's a bunch of, you know, rocks were turning over. It's like, well, there's five million people, there's three nine. Yes, you know, and then like Drew Carey, the host of The Price is Right, he had some challenges in life, and he to this day has been every year, he'll buy a ton of personalized stationery from the Ziggler family because he loved listening to Zig. Wow. So, you know, I don't know if we can get in touch with Drew. I'd love to. I love the Drew Carey show, by the way. Yeah, he has massive reach and massive appeal. He would, you know, he had his own show, he had the Whose Line Is It Anyways, and he had the prices right for years. Yeah. So there's a lot of people that we still don't know to this day have been touched by Zig, but just through his message would want to help target it.
SPEAKER_02What you just talked about is the organic side of marketing, which is our third strategy. So paid is obviously you're paying Facebook to promote whatever ad you come up with. Organic is when you get collaborations with whoever it is, or you're just posting your own out there and it gets its own following and reach, which obviously Zig already has. And that's what we're really focused on now. That's why Prothem's here. Christina, we have two marketing interns that their job is let's create organic content and be out putting it out more frequently. That's what Gary Vanderchek talks all about all the time, is you have to put tons of content out there so that it just grabs a hold of people. And so we're having fun videos at the park, things like that. So we're just elevating our game on the organic side that we can cost us nothing to post. We make a video if it gets 5,000, 10,000, 100,000 views, that's just reach that didn't cost us anything. And that's ultimately kind of what brought us to the podcast idea of hey, it's just another way to reach people talking about business. And, you know, they'd obviously make videos in the park that might reach kids or even people that want to come play. And so we're just trying to get the name out there as many different ways as we can.
SPEAKER_00So do you have stuff that's geared towards the kids versus stuff that's geared towards the parents? Because we know the parents have the credit card. Oh, yeah, for sure. But is there a dual-pronged approach of like, well, we know that this speaks to the 35 to 45 year old who's trying to look for you know adventure parts and things like that versus uh the type of video that's skewed towards a child and what they would just find entertaining? Yeah. Like are there are there?
SPEAKER_02That's what we're trying to figure out. So paid, yes. Paid, we can do an ad specifically targeting moms, making decisions about their birthday child or whatever it is. You can do corporate specific ads. So paid is a lot easier to create an ad specific for a demographic and then put it out in front. For our organic social media channels, you want to be relatively consistent in what you're doing. So there it's probably more geared towards just showing the fun in the park. But we look at our stats. I mean, we obviously need to get better at that, and we'll see a wide range of people that watch the content, but it is more focused on just show the fun in the park, whether it's a kid or a parent saying, hey, let's go do that. But that was again coming back to the podcast, like, well, this is another way to reach a different type of person that may be interested in the business side of things that may you own a business or work at a business and wants to come have a corporate outing at the park or has kids, they listen to the podcast, like, hey, here boulders, you know, having a tough time right now. Let's go support them and go have a good time at the park. So it's just getting things out there in as many ways as possible. Probably we're not new to it, but we're still pretty darn new to it that we're gonna learn. That's Protham's background, what he's working on in college is financial analysis and that. So he's gonna dig into our data and help point things out and all that. So, Protham, anything you want to add to it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I've actually been doing a little bit of digging myself. And what I've come to find out is our age range is usually between 18 and 30. That's where most of our crowd is right now. Interesting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we've got to kind of create content for that. What's tricky about kids is you can't market specific to kids. So when they create an Instagram account, they're gonna do it under their parents. So the the age will never show, hey, you're reaching 12 year olds. That it's not even a I probably don't want my kid to have a kid. I don't want a kid to have a you don't want to get marked phone until like 15. So that's a whole other thing. But they're watching on YouTube and things like that, whether it's their iPads. So it's hard to know exactly how to reach people, but we're trying to do as much organic content as we can this year because it doesn't cost us anything.
Partnerships, Schools, And New Ideas
SPEAKER_00Did you say after this? I'm gonna go walk by the park. But uh yeah, I guess a question would be is it set up in a way where you could have like a race through the park, like a race through the apparatus? We do need little side business ideas like like I was thinking like Ninja Warrior. They have this structure and people kind of race through it all the time. What if that creates a buzz of kids trying to race through it? Or you know, maybe there's a different course that they do that on, but I don't know, just just just a thought or idea. Because I remember maybe five, six years ago, there was like a Ninja Warrior gym that popped up in like the Plano area. Oh, yeah. And me and my buddy had to go shake it out after work one day.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Yeah, there's lots of little side things we're looking at to try to bring revenue in, you know, on the off hours for sure. What are peak hours? What are slow hours? Yeah, oh, it's very much weekend driven. It's really, I should say, it's more based on kids' school schedules. So spring break is the blockbuster week of them all. Really because everybody's off for school. Parents usually take off to be with their kids, but the outdoor activities of swimming and all of that really hasn't kicked in yet. So everyone's looking for something indoor to do. Last year, as an example, it rained on Thursday of spring break, and our sales went up by like 40% because a lot of people couldn't go to Six Flags because Six Flags closed. And so spring break is the biggest, Saturdays are obviously the biggest every day. And then, you know, summer, we have more opportunity for that's something we're gonna focus on this year. Is how do we get more people in during the summer? Summer hasn't been as busy as I would have hoped. It's air conditioned.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, oh yeah, so okay for sure. Yeah, then if people are just traveling or something. I'm curious. What's like the utilization rate? I don't know if I'm asking that correctly, but like I look at a golf course, let's say it has a hundred T times in a day. I see what you're saying. And then 40% get used up because you know, some too early, some it's still dark, it's too hot. Like I call that capacity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't know the number, but that's our biggest opportunity is I say the lights are off in our building way too much because when kids are in school, let's use that, which is you know, eight or nine months a year, we're closed on Tuesday and Wednesday completely. We only open on Monday and Thursday at five o'clock at night and Friday at four, and obviously open the weekends. So all week during the day, the lights are off unless we can get a group in. And that's where the revenue opportunity really lies is if we can get more corporate groups, field trips, youth groups, whatever, homeschools that can come during the week that otherwise the lights are off and bring any revenue in, it just lifts things. So today we had a field trip in there. Those are great opportunities because the capacity is enormous compared to what we've been doing.
Timeline To Screen And Closing Thoughts
SPEAKER_00Do you have any partnerships with like so on the real estate side, like we're saying for the last five years, we've been seeing like monascore schools, kinder cares, like a bunch of daycares and youth-oriented schools, private schools popping up all across the state, really the country. Um, there's a big private equity push in that arena. But I'm curious if there's a way to, you know, find a local or area franchisee and market through there, market through that guy or that girl, and have those kids come in on, you know, this school comes in this week, this school comes in this week. Again, you're directing it towards the adult who owns the facility. 100%. So it is a unique thing that the person who's enjoying it, it's not the person who's buying it. Right.
SPEAKER_02The decision maker is different than the consumer uh in that aspect. Yeah, and then we've got a sales team. I've got a meeting with her. Do you have space for a daycare inside? No, we haven't really gone down that avenue.
SPEAKER_00I'm just wondering if you had a fixed audience there where you're like, you're already providing one service, and you say, well, for an extra$30 per month or something, they can go run around the park, or maybe there's a yeah, it's just throwing out.
SPEAKER_02No, we'll take all the ideas, man, for sure. Duke, let's close this down. This is an awesome conversation. Last question I have for you about the movie coming back to Zig, you got the series A that's starting. Then you mentioned kind of the the production, all that, and the release. Like in your mind, what's your timeline look like?
SPEAKER_00It'd probably be three years. Check something like where it's out and people are watching and doing it. It could be as short as two years, but you never know. Again, the funding and the distribution agreements and stuff like that. That can definitely take time. And or if it becomes such a big hit in terms of the distribution channels that people we're talking to, you know, it could create a bidding war, and then we'd want to figure out that in an appropriate timing and fashion so we're not rushed. Okay, good.
SPEAKER_02Well, I wish you the best. In my opinion, you're gonna crush it with it. It's gonna be phenomenal. I can't wait to watch it. I can't wait to hear the story along the way and hopefully be a part of it in any way, small way, shape, or form that I can be. So let's stay in contact.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. No, I'm just glad Zig positively impacted my life and that I get to share that with others. Yeah, but thank you for having me. Of course, dude, thank you.