[00:03:17] Raleigh Williams: And the interesting thing about the book is that it talks about this idea of resistance. And what resistance is it’s this force that makes things difficult for you when you’re really pursuing the thing that is your highest? And the real estate equivalent would be what is the highest and best use of you as an individual, right?

[00:03:39] Raleigh Williams: What is the thing that you’re really built to do that you really should be doing? And when I started my entrepreneurial journey and I would face resistance, I thought that it was, I was looking for the path of least resistance. I thought that the path of least resistance would be the easiest path to success.

[00:03:55] Raleigh Williams: And The War of Art kind of flips that. That when you’re really doing the thing that you’re built to do, you should orient yourself to the thing that you’re most scared to do, the thing that feels the hardest to do. And that’s really a much better true north than trying to navigate through a path of lease resistance in investing or pursuing something entrepreneurial where there’s not a well trodden path and you’re kind of out there on your own.

[00:04:20] Raleigh Williams: The War of Art has helped me. I read it at least once a year, and it helps me reorient to, am I on track to do the thing that’s going to bring me ultimately the most joy, because it’s me fulfilling my highest and best use. 

[00:04:36] Patrick Donley: You would say that when you are doing the thing that you’re meant to do, you’re going to get roadblocks, you’re going to hit snags, you’re going to have things that come up either mentally or in the outside world, emotionally, psychologically, that are going to trip you up. Is that accurate to say? 

[00:04:51] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, I think Pressfield comes at it from a very artistic, because he’s a writer, and so he kind of writes it built towards writers and kind of pursuing your artistic journey, which I’ve never really thought of myself as an artist. You know, I think of myself as just a business guy trying to make a buck out there.

[00:05:10] Raleigh Williams: And I think the idea of re resist, you know, there’s two forces. One is resistance, which is the thing that blocks you. And then the muse is the kind of your better angels. Your Damon, your conscious, you know, the part of yourself that knows what you should be doing. And we’re all on our own heroes journey of doing, trying to figure out what we’re supposed to contribute to the world.

[00:05:38] Raleigh Williams: And it’s usually the case that your heroes journey isn’t a yellow brick road to Oz without issues. You know? It’s quite the opposite. 

[00:05:49] Patrick Donley: Yeah. Right. No hero’s journey is without some pitfalls along the way. Right. It’s not a good story. 

[00:05:55] Raleigh Williams: The reason why I give it to entrepreneurs or people thinking about entrepreneurship is because most of the time people get into entrepreneurship because they’re trying to find some version of freedom or some version of wealth.

[00:06:07] Raleigh Williams: Get to their first million dollars, right? And they typically, at least if they’re like me they’re just trying to find the path of least resistance to do that. And I think that you end up finding that all paths are hard, all paths are harder than you thought that they would be when you got into it.

[00:06:23] Raleigh Williams: And so that shouldn’t be the guiding factor. You know, that shouldn’t be the one that you shouldn’t just find the easiest way because it’s harder than you think it’s going to be anyway. And so, like, I think it, it helps people get into this idea of it’s going to be hard, but do it anyway. And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that it’s not right.

[00:06:44] Patrick Donley: Yeah, Steven Pressfield’s got some great interviews. I was actually listening to him as I was doing the research for our interview, and he’s got one with Tim Ferris, which is outstanding and one with Rich Roll that’s just really great as well. And he just talks about his own kind of hero’s journey. And I don’t think he was published until he was about in his fifties, like actually finally published until he was in his fifties.

[00:07:05] Patrick Donley: And he talked about how he would take like basically an advertising type job, kind of, you know, just to get a salary. And whenever he did that, life did not work out for him. It was like life was trying to tell him, you know, like, you’re not on the right path. And I don’t know, I think we get clues along the way when you are on the right path and when you’re not, and it’s something, I don’t know, there’s just clues along the way that you gotta pay attention to.

[00:07:27] Raleigh Williams: I actually interviewed him on my wife’s podcast, it’s called The Motivational Podcast, and it was just, I mean, he’s an interesting interview. I’m sure Tim Ferris did a much better job than I did because he lays it all out there, just like his B, he kind of defaults to what he wrote. He’s like, well, I, that’s exactly how I wrote it, you know?

[00:07:44] Raleigh Williams: And yeah he’s a super interesting guy because he, and I actually think about Steven Presfield a lot, or like someone like Harrison Ford, I think about a lot who was like a carpenter until his late 30. You know, I’m 30, I turned 34 on Thursday, happy birthday. And so I think a lot about like the path of people that don’t really click into their thing until later on in life and how they deal with that kind of before it all starts clicking for him.

[00:08:12] Patrick Donley: Yeah. That’s awesome that you got to the chance to interview him. Did he have any insights related to business that came up? 

[00:08:18] Raleigh Williams: I think he was always really surprised that the application that people use it for in business, I don’t think that was really who he was writing to. I think he was just kind of writing to his former self as an artist.

[00:08:29] Raleigh Williams: And he definitely doesn’t think of himself as a business guy. You know, he thinks of himself as kind of a renaissance man that’s kind of artistic in nature, which is awesome because I spend most of my time around business guys and how do we monetize this more and how do we make more money off of it, whatever.

[00:08:46] Raleigh Williams: And it’s just not his. It’s not his way. And so it was very like, and it was also interesting because I have kids and so one of the questions that I asked him was, how do you think about resistance? How? How do you know whether it’s resistance or programming? Like how do you think about resistance with respect to raising kids?

[00:09:04] Raleigh Williams: And he is like, well, I’ve never raised kids, so you should think about that for yourself kind of thing. Kinda like these are the principles and you can figure out the application for yourself. 

[00:09:13] Patrick Donley: Definitely sounds like you’re a huge reader. Are there any other books that were influential along your way?

[00:09:18] Patrick Donley: Like when you were first kind of getting started in your entrepreneurial journey or that you’ve read recently? 

[00:09:23] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, I, so I’m actually writing a book right now that’s geared toward kind of the entrepreneurial endgame, which is getting your business ready to sell, which I think there’s, kind of, is woefully under documented.

[00:09:38] Raleigh Williams: I mean, there’s a lot out there on just the transaction itself, a purchase and sale agreement, and you know, how you go through the paces of getting the transaction done. And there’s less about how you actually, when you have three to five years left in the business, how you actually start thinking about positioning it to sale.

[00:09:55] Raleigh Williams: So, and as I’ve been reading recently, the Star Principle is one that I spend a lot of time looking at by Richard Koch, who is the founder of LEK Consulting Group. That’s one that I don’t think gets enough love for how good it is. And I think in terms of business investing and real estate investing as well, there are few books that I think are just tried and true in terms of the principle of looking for star businesses versus cash cows versus question marks versus dogs and what the consistent thread between those are.

[00:10:28] Raleigh Williams: That’s probably one of the better ones that I’ve read recently. Naval The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. 

[00:10:35] Patrick Donley: Say more about that. So is he the 80/20 guy correct?

[00:10:39] Raleigh Williams: He also wrote the 80/20 principle as well. Yeah. 

[00:10:42] Patrick Donley: So does he apply that in the Star principle?

[00:10:45] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. The basic insight is of all of his investments that he’s done, 20% of them have returned 80% of the results.

[00:10:54] Raleigh Williams: And of those 20%, they’re all star businesses. Which basically, if you put it on an X and Y axis, you know, there’s market leaders, market followers, and high growth, low growth. And if you’re a market leader and a high growth market, you’re a star business. And basically as the market continues to grow, the market leader gets more than their fair share of the market.

[00:11:19] Raleigh Williams: So if you think of Covid and e-comm businesses like Amazon was far and away the beneficiary of that change because they were the market leader in a high growth market. And those are star businesses and a market leader in a low growth business as a cash cow. And so I think about it because I look at businesses every single day, and some of them have been around for six months and they’ve made a lot of money.

[00:11:44] Raleigh Williams: Some of them have been around for 12 years and they’re on a slight decline. And it’s just a matter, I think the star principle. It helps kind of build consistency in the way that I think about investing and also trying to position my own businesses as I get them ready to sell. Trying to position them so that they look like star businesses, whether they are or not.

[00:12:04] Raleigh Williams: And, you know, making it, building the narrative around selling a business that is high growth and a high growth market. You know, 

[00:12:11] Patrick Donley: I wanted to kind of backtrack a little bit to give people context to your story, which is really interesting. I want to hear about law school graduating from law school, the Sunday scaries, once you got, you know, into the working world.

[00:12:24] Patrick Donley: Just talk to us a little bit about your background and following a path maybe that was conventional or laid out for you and just what happened after things unfolded in your life. 

[00:12:35] Raleigh Williams: I’m the youngest of five, so I’m the baby of the family. My dad was a lawyer. He was a litigator. And I have three brothers and sisters that are lawyers as well.

[00:12:47] Raleigh Williams: And so it was a pretty well trodden path for us to go to law school. You know, I think my dad is a very, was a very influential, like he, he is a very strong personality, very opinionated and pretty persuasive in terms of kind of the idea with me growing up was no matter what you want to do in life, going to law school is the best prep for you to do whatever you want to do.

[00:13:11] Raleigh Williams: I think that advice made more sense when my dad went to law school and it was $6 a semester to go versus what I paid to go to law school and the realities of carrying debt for most people. And I always knew first I wanted to be a professional football player and once my growth stopped at five-nine, I kind of started to go to my plan Bs and Cs.

[00:13:35] Raleigh Williams: And I went to the University of Chicago for law school, which is a very prestigious law school and law world, and prestige kind of is the oil that greases the skids in that world. That’s kind of what everyone, so I went to a great law school and I went after law school. I went to a firm called Skadden Arps, which is a very prestigious law firm, and I was in the mergers and acquisitions group for about four months, which I hated.

[00:14:05] Raleigh Williams: So mergers and acquisitions is when you bring a lawyer in to buy and sell companies. So we worked for private equity firms like Blackstone Fortress, you know, the biggest private equity firms in the world, buying the biggest companies in the world. And after. I hated it, and I wasn’t sure why. So I thought maybe I was just in the wrong practice group.

[00:14:24] Raleigh Williams: So I actually switched to a real estate group after that at a firm called Vinson & Elkins in Dallas, and I hated that too. And so I was six or seven months into practicing law, this career that was kind of laid out for me, and I was at a big law firm. I’d kind of reached the pinnacle of what everyone tries to optimize for in that world.

[00:14:46] Raleigh Williams: You know, I was at a big firm, I was making 180 grand a year, which is kind of the starting salary for these law firm associates. I was 26 years old and I just couldn’t stand it. And I think the main thing that I couldn’t stand about it was when I was in law school, I took a real estate class at the business school at University of Chicago and the professor of the class said, When you are in your twenties, the most important thing you should do is you should find somebody that is excellent at assessing and taking risk and learn as much as you can from them.

[00:15:23] Raleigh Williams: And at these big law firms, they were some of the smartest people that I’d ever been around in terms of these lawyers partners working on, you know, the most sophisticated deals that exist. I think it was so ingrained in me that you could go to law school to do whatever it is that you wanted to do, and it seemed like there was a way for them to make so much more money and, you know, not be so chained to the desk.

[00:15:47] Raleigh Williams: That, and it was just all surprising to me that they wouldn’t do it. And so I felt suffocated to be around these people that should have been the best at assessing risk from just an analytic standpoint and just being completely unwilling to dip their toe in the water and, you know, risk losing a dollar on a deal.

[00:16:07] Raleigh Williams: I felt like. I needed to get out as fast as possible to not kind of catch that risk aversion. And I had a daughter that was, she’s eight years old now, so she was two at the time. And I felt like it was going to get harder and harder for me to leave. I felt like I was making more money than I deserved to make, and I needed to reset the market on myself.

[00:16:33] Raleigh Williams: I needed to just go from 180 to zero and that the sooner the better to do it. And I had tried a couple, you know, I started studying for a consulting job to do management consulting. I thought maybe that would be better because it was more business oriented. And I got my real estate license, which like lawyers practicing real estate, lawyers, getting their real estate license is like, what are you doing, bro?

[00:16:55] Raleigh Williams: What is your problem? And I was just desperate to do anything. A couple of months in, I started getting these anxiety attacks, which I’d never really had before, like on Sundays. So I call it the Sunday scaries, where I would be sitting in my apartment Sunday at five o’clock and I would tell my wife, I’m like, I have to be back in the office in like 14 hours and I have to sleep for eight.

[00:17:20] Raleigh Williams: So like, I start to get all these kinds of anxiety attacks around, you know, getting emails from partners to fix certain things on certain deals. And in school, you go through this process where like, even if you have a hard class or a hard professor or any of that stuff, there’s kind of, it’s all finite, right?

[00:17:37] Raleigh Williams: You know, it’s one semester and then it’s over. You know, I can bear it for nine weeks, 12 weeks, whatever. And this was my first real job where it was like the prospect was, this is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. You know, there’s no natural terminal point to this. And just that idea made me.

[00:17:57] Raleigh Williams: I had to get out. It gave me so much anxiety to think that I could do that for the rest of my life. 

[00:18:02] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I can completely empathize. I have the same kind of experience right out of college. Kind of got the job that you’re supposed to want and get, and I looked around at the 40 year olds or 50 year olds that I was going to be in the future.

[00:18:15] Patrick Donley: And like it just filled me with dread to think about that idea. 

[00:18:21] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. What was the job, what type of job was it? 

[00:18:24] Patrick Donley: I did a management training program at a bank and then got placed in their investment banking division. And it was my dream, you know, from a young age, whether that was instilled from my family or my own, you know, I as a finance major, so like, that’s just what you were supposed to do.

[00:18:37] Patrick Donley: And so I wanted to hear, in your situation, were you sharing what you were going through in with coworkers? because that’s a tough spot to be in, to not be able to talk about, I mean, you’re, I’m sure you’re sharing with your wife, but were you able to talk with your family about it or?

[00:18:53] Raleigh Williams: I really wasn’t, I shared a little bit with coworkers at the beginning.

[00:18:58] Raleigh Williams: I had kind of thought that these big prestigious firms, you get a lot of people that go from Ivy League law schools. And so I think I just went into law school with this idea that I think was the wrong idea. This idea that you go to Chicago or Stanford or Harvard, or pick the school and you’re going there to preserve optionality that you know the world is your oyster because now you’re fully educated and you can do whatever it is that you want to do.

[00:19:24] Raleigh Williams: But I think you find that the people that are the most successful at a law firm aren’t at a law firm. So they can do whatever it is they want to do. They’re at a law firm because it’s what, because that is what they want to do. And those are the people that enjoy it. I’m sure that there are people at investment banks, not many of them, most people are at an investment bank because it preserves their optionality and they’re doing it so that way they can, you know, get another brass ring and move on to the next step at some stage.

[00:19:51] Raleigh Williams: But the reality of actually being at an investment bank or a law firm for any period of time when it’s not what you actually want to do is terrible. And so I felt like anytime that I’d voiced my displeasure to my family, I had the best job that anyone in my family had ever. You know, they all went to kind of state law schools and they were kind of practicing small law, you know, family practices kind of in local counties and stuff.

[00:20:18] Raleigh Williams: And I had the job that everyone wanted. You know, Peter Teal talks about him leaving big New York law firm and he’s like, it’s like Alcatraz, but everyone that’s outside wants to come in and everyone that’s inside wants to get out. I felt it was a super isolating experience for me because anytime that I confided in my coworkers, it just kind of always seemed to either they wouldn’t relate, which felt more isolating.

[00:20:46] Raleigh Williams: And then it also kind of got out that like, oh, Raleigh’s like not here for the long term. He’s not committed to the firm like we are because it’s a semi complete process, you know, if you’re there for the right reasons, you’re trying to become a partner at the firm and, you know, eight to 10 years.

[00:21:01] Raleigh Williams: And that’s a, there’s a winnowing process that occurs in that where, you know, you go from a hundred associates to 10 that end up becoming partners. And so it’s a little, it’s not as cutthroat as I think it used to be in the or it’s as it’s portrayed in suits or some of the other TV shows, but it’s still, it’s built to be a meat grinder and it’s built to separate the wheat from the chaff on an expedited time horizon.

[00:21:26] Patrick Donley: So at what stage did you start to make your, like plans for your escape? 

[00:21:31] Raleigh Williams: As soon as I moved to the real estate when I was in mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, I thought this maybe isn’t an indictment on all of law. Maybe I’m just in the wrong group. Maybe I’m just not practicing the right type of law.

[00:21:44] Raleigh Williams: And so then I mo I thought maybe real estate will be more useful for me to, you know, scratch my entrepreneurial edge because at least I’m learning things that I can use on my own. But when you’re working on 2 billion mortgages and you’re documenting it, it’s, you know, I learned how to read a survey and I learned how to deal with title exceptions and, you know, go through a lot of things that you need to do if you want to be a real estate entrepreneur, a real estate developer, whatever.

[00:22:11] Raleigh Williams: I think it was much more of a, I really didn’t respect the people and like the partnership at the firm. I thought that they were bright people, but I just had zero desire to, to be like them. I viewed them similar to my professors in law school, like they’re all very bright people, but I just have no inclination to be mentored by them because what they’re great at isn’t something that, like, I’m not interested in writing papers for trade journals, so I don’t care what a professor has to say about what I should do with my life and I’m not interested in, you know, hobnobbing with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

[00:22:48] Raleigh Williams: So I’m not interested in what partners at law firms have to say either. And I think kind of tying it back to The War of Art, I think as you get older, as you go from your twenties, and I think learning to pay attention less and less to other people’s advice and being okay to kind of trust your it was the first time right, that I had kind of done everything that all of the people that were older and smarter than me had told me to do.

[00:23:13] Raleigh Williams: Right? I went to the best schools, I was at the best firm. And it was the first time where I was like, okay, I’ve done it as well as I can do it, and I’m just really not happy. So like, what does Raleigh want to do? And it was the first time that I ever asked myself that question. I was 26 years old when it happened.

[00:23:28] Raleigh Williams: And then the rest was just in pursuit of trying to answer that question. 

[00:23:33] Patrick Donley: So let’s go into that. What does Raleigh want to do? Did you have entrepreneurial dreams? Like while you were at the law firm or even prior to that, had you had dreams of like, I’m going to start something on my own. I don’t care what it is, but I’m going to start my own gig, my own deal.

[00:23:48] Raleigh Williams: I think what I had mostly what I call Cinderella syndrome, where I felt like if I was a good lawyer, what I really wanted was I wanted my career Prince charming to come and sweep me off of my feet and have me be the c e o of a big company because I went to a smart school and I was practicing at a smart place, and I wanted to make, I was just naive in, in terms of how the world works.

[00:24:16] Raleigh Williams: And so I’d never really thought about doing anything in my own because I was good at school, which is supposed to be the thing that keeps you on a safe path. And so what I really wanted, I was always really good at sports and I was really good at school. And so I was never the guy selling rocks to my neighbor or like doing lemonade stand or like, you know, I was more introverted than extroverted.

[00:24:40] Raleigh Williams: So I wasn’t like massively sales oriented. And my grandparents were entrepreneurial. They were real estate developers in Orlando, kind of before Disney came around. And you know, my dad always had his own law firm and he was general counsel of a public company. So I kind of came from, it’s like, not entrepreneur it, it wasn’t massively entrepreneurial, right?

[00:25:01] Raleigh Williams: We weren’t going to flea markets on the weekend and hawking baseball cards. Right. And I always kind of felt like as long as I was good at school and that I would be kind of on a, we did a lot of manual labor when like my parents had a farm. And so every weekend we would go to the farm and clear land. I really wanted a job that I didn’t have to work with my hands.

[00:25:24] Raleigh Williams: That was like the thing that I was optimizing for. And law was like a great option for, you know, it was like, I definitely don’t want to do a blue collar thing. I want to do a white collar thing. And that was all done in reaction to not liking manual labor. And then when I actually did the white collar thing too, I didn’t like it either.

[00:25:40] Raleigh Williams: So I think I kind of defaulted into entrepreneurship just because there was a lack of better options and no one was going to pay me what I wanted to get paid. I think I also have, I think I have more disdain for authority than I thought that I did. And, you know, the prospect of, I think I was willing to kind of grip my teeth and bear it through the educational process.

[00:26:00] Raleigh Williams: And then when law felt very similar to that, right? You have guys that are in their forties, guys, and gals that are in their forties and fifties and it’s very hierarchical. And that hierarchy really that hierarchy with no end in sight on how it ever ends. Like when you ever get to the finish point of it, that was just like suffocating to me.

[00:26:23] Patrick Donley: What was your next step? You hate law. Tell me how you escaped. Like what were the actual steps you took to leave the law practice doing m and a, how you told your family, your parents, the reactions, all of that. 

[00:26:37] Raleigh Williams: I had a couple missteps, right, where I tried to get a real estate license. I tried to kind of moonlight on the side to sell real estate on the side of my big law job.

[00:26:46] Raleigh Williams: None of those things really came to fruition or were super helpful. The thing that ultimately happened is I read an article on, it’s called Market Watch and it’s, it was called the Unbelievably Lucrative Business of Escape Rooms. And before law school, I had helped my brother start a trampoline park business and I had sold him my interest in the trampoline park business to go to law school.

[00:27:10] Raleigh Williams: And there was a space at that trampoline park business that was like 7,000 square feet. And this escape room thing in 2015 was just a new thing. And I read that article in Dallas, there were three or four escape rooms that you could see their bookings for the day that, so like you could very easily log onto the website and get a sense for what they’re making in revenue, at least.

[00:27:33] Raleigh Williams: Because all of their bookings were public. So if there’s four spots left in the room, you know, whatever. They made a hundred bucks already. Every day when I got into the office, I would track I had a spreadsheet, so before I did my law work, I would pull up my spreadsheet and I would just update what the bookings were and when I was, you know, after I did it for a month or two, to me it looked like they were all doing at least a million dollars a year in sales, these escape rooms.

[00:27:56] Raleigh Williams: And so then I went and I did every single escape room in Dallas and I would just kind of inventory what was in the room. Oh, this door popped open. How did they do that? YouTube, how do you make a door open when you move a book? Or, I’d never heard of an electro-magnet door or like magnets moving things, or like low voltage tech.

[00:28:15] Raleigh Williams: I didn’t know anything. And I texted my brother and I sent him the article and I said, I think, you know, this could be potentially interesting to do in that space that still exists at the trampoline park that was in Utah. And he said, yeah, it could be interesting. And that the trampoline park was doing well.

[00:28:29] Raleigh Williams: It was doing like a million bucks a year off a 2 million. I was doing like a million bucks a year in profit off of a $2 million a year in sales. And so he was making a lot of money and I thought, I said, why don’t we partner on this? I’ll run it. I’ll figure out how to build it, and I’ll quit my law job. I don’t have any money right now to really speak of, but you know that I’m leaving a $180,000 a year job to take no salary and just to have equity in this thing.

[00:28:55] Raleigh Williams: He said, okay. And I ultimately convinced another one of my buddies that was working at KPMG as an M&A accountant, like on the transaction side. So both of us quit our jobs to go and start this escape room thing. And so that’s how it got started. And then ultimately the escape room became pretty successful.

[00:29:11] Raleigh Williams: So I used some of my equity to buy back into the trampoline park business, and we grew. That ultimately became William’s Entertainment Group that my brother and I were partners on. And that grew to seven locations of trampolines, escape room, ax, throwing another kind of escape room style business that we did.

[00:29:30] Raleigh Williams: And so that holding company for that entertainment business between the real estate and the operating companies, we ended up selling those businesses off and nine different transactions for $26 million in 2021, 2022. 

[00:29:44] Patrick Donley: Okay. I want to slow down a little bit because there was a lot there. So you left the law practice really without much savings it sounds like, to start this new venture.

[00:29:55] Raleigh Williams: I had 30 grand. I had 30 grand in savings. 

[00:29:59] Patrick Donley: 30 grand, okay. And did you also have a brother that had worked at Goldman Sachs that had left that company to do this with you? 

[00:30:08] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. Yeah, to do the trampoline part. He had left Goldman in 2010 to do this trampoline park. I was still in college, so I helped him build it.

[00:30:16] Raleigh Williams: We had seen these trampoline park things in St. Louis. We had no idea how to do it. We bought the trampolines from China and we’re like, man, how do they make the trampolines go onto the wall? I’m not sure. So we, I mean we just figured it out off of these cheap trampolines that we all had, that we had to replace after like three months of being in business.

[00:30:35] Raleigh Williams: So that, so he quit Goldman in 20 10, 20 11 to do this trampoline park thing, and I helped him while I was an undergrad. And then in 2015 when I quit the law, you know, and we started this escape room thing, he was also a part of it as well. And so your 

[00:30:52] Patrick Donley: dad had a son that left a prestigious m and a law company, a son that left Goldman Sachs.

[00:30:58] Patrick Donley: What was his thought process at the time? Like what, 

[00:31:02] Raleigh Williams: when I told my dad that I was quitting law, so I was his only son that went to law school. He had two daughters that went and a couple son-in-laws that he had convinced to go. So I was the son there, and I was doing it at the highest levels, which he thought that I was a little like prestige optimizer, like he would always give me grief for that.

[00:31:23] Raleigh Williams: But when I quit the law and told him that I was moving back to Utah to kind of do this entertainment thing with my brother, it was bad. Like we didn’t talk for, you know, a year and a half, two years, he was, I mean, he told me that he thought that I was jeopardizing my career, my ability to pay for my family.

[00:31:43] Raleigh Williams: It wasn’t like, Hey, man, like, yeah, you do. You’re educated, you know, you can go do whatever you want to do. Like, they actually had a house, they had a house in Utah. It was like a, it was a big house in Utah and they actually cut power to the house. So that way my wife and I wouldn’t, so we, we moved in with my wife’s parents.

[00:32:03] Raleigh Williams: We moved in to their basement. We had a two-year-old and. So we moved into my in-laws’ basement to live for the first six months, and both of my parents were very adamant to not subsidize my poor decision making was what they kind of phrased it as. And again, to tie it back to if I was trying to optimize for the path of lease resistance, you know, I would’ve felt like I was, to me, as I started to pursue the thing that I ultimately wanted to do, I was always surprised that people that I knew cared about me were so adamantly opposed to the path that I was picking for myself and, you know, would stand in opposition within reason to really try to keep me on the path that they had charted out for me.

[00:32:50] Raleigh Williams: That’s why I think The War of Art and things like that are helpful was because you should expect resistance. You should expect the people that are in your tribe to not understand. And you shouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to get their buy-in to what you want to do with your life because it’s wasted breath at best and at worst, it’s you’re igniting them to oppose you.

[00:33:12] Patrick Donley: I gotta believe though, that you had the support of your wife to do this. I don’t know that you could have done this. I would guess without her support.

[00:33:20] Raleigh Williams: I couldn’t have done it without her support. She was the one, she was the only one that was completely, I had her full throated support on the idea and I think that she knew how miserable I was practicing law.

[00:33:35] Raleigh Williams: Like for me doing the escape room thing, it wasn’t like, Hey, this is my fastest path to a million dollars. I was like, if I make 60 grand a year for the rest of my life, but I don’t have to wear a suit ever again, like I’m in, I’ll take it. You know what I mean? Like if I get to wear tennis shoes to, to work instead of these leather, whatever, these are like.

[00:33:55] Raleigh Williams: I’m in for whatever that process was. It really wasn’t because I felt like this was my chance to build my empire. It was just that I was so unhappy at where I was at that I was really willing to do basically anything. And this felt like a life raft. 

[00:34:10] Patrick Donley: I completely understand. When I was at the investment bank, I wanted to burn every suit that I owned.

[00:34:14] Patrick Donley: All the shoes, like all the ties. I never wanted to step back like I wanted to burn those bridges, you know, forever. So when you did that first escape room, were you, I thought you bought the, like the intellectual property to an escape room. Is that correct? Or did you actually buy a physical location? 

[00:34:33] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, that’s true.

[00:34:36] Patrick Donley: Say more about that. So how does that work? 

[00:34:38] Raleigh Williams: We knew that we wanted to do the escape room business, but we had no idea. You know, if you’ve ever been to an escape room, there’s like puzzles and, you know, ways to make things work. Like I said, I didn’t know anything about, you know, low voltage, anything.

[00:34:51] Raleigh Williams: And I had come from this background of buying and selling assets in order to build your wealth. And so before we quit our jobs to do it, I actually did look around to see if there was an escape room business that was purchasable that, you know, I could just buy instead of starting it from scratch. And it was kind of a tale of two cities.

[00:35:12] Raleigh Williams: You either had escape rooms that were doing really well, but it was right on the right, on the beginning part of the wave. And so they wanted these astronomical numbers for a business that had been around for a very little amount of time. Or you had businesses that were just not doing well because they had built it in a podunk town, you know, where there just isn’t the population support to like really have a, an entertainment business like that thrive.

[00:35:36] Raleigh Williams: And, you know, they were not purchasable cause the business wasn’t good. So what kind of the middle ground that I decided on was I found a business. A business that was actually in Europe, in Eastern Europe that was an escape room business that had started in 2012 because the escape room craze kind of started there in Asia and Europe first.

[00:35:56] Raleigh Williams: And so they were one of the top rated businesses and I found them on TripAdvisor and I hit them up and I said, I don’t think I can buy your business, but I would like to buy a license to your business. I won’t use your logo, your domain, any of that stuff, but I just want to buy your, basically your IP on how you built your rooms, how you had these puzzles work and lemme just buy the US rights to your business.

[00:36:21] Raleigh Williams: And for them they were, they had no plans to expand. You know, they had one location that they had ha had for four or five years prior to that. And so for them, it was just found money. And for us, it helped us completely expedite the process of building the thing because we knew that we were building rooms that were stress tested, that people liked, and we had the help to build it.

[00:36:43] Raleigh Williams: And so that was kind of the first little IP acquisition that we did that, I mean, the rooms like the, you know, we sold that business three years ago and the rooms that are in all of the locations are still by and large. Basically, those first IP acquisitions that we bought in terms of the layouts, the pricing, the kind of standard operating procedures, all that stuff we just bought instead of figuring it out ourselves.

[00:37:07] Patrick Donley: And so the space that you used was next to your brother’s trampoline park? Yeah. Tell me about, were there any I’ve got a buddy that I golf with who’s got like a bowling alley arcade stuff. Volleyball outside, and he did, he added escape rooms. I think he added three escape rooms and he had all kinds of issues with the city getting the thing done.

[00:37:30] Patrick Donley: I don’t know for what reason, but like the city inspectors really gave him a tough time. Did you run into any of those kinds of issues as you were trying to do the buildout of this thing? 

[00:37:39] Raleigh Williams: We did the first room that we did technically the correct way, the above board way. The way that we ultimately ended up doing is you have a room that just looks like an office room and you put a little some puzzles on the desk and you say, Hey, city inspector, this is our new escape room business.

[00:38:00] Raleigh Williams: And they say, that’s great. Here’s your c here’s your certificate of occupancy, and then you start construction after that. Right? That’s the way that we ended up doing it. Later on down the road, we’ll see what the statute of limitations is on, you know, city permitting issues. So yeah, we, we did the first room that we built.

[00:38:17] Raleigh Williams: We were trying to get our co, our certificate of occupancy and the city said, you know, this is not up to fire code. This is, you know, you have all these problems, you need to have all these additional things put in. They didn’t give us our co, which we really needed. I mean, I had quit my job. And so it was really hard to have an escape room business without escape rooms with no certificate of occupancy.

[00:38:38] Raleigh Williams: And in that kind of, that gap period, we bought a school bus, an old school bus that was like a 1984 Bluebird bus. And we tore all of the seats out because we had a welder on staff. Cause we were building all these prison rooms. The business was called Alcatraz Escape Games. And so we were trying to build prison themes and kind of scarier themes and more adult themes like ghosts and that kinda thing.

[00:39:01] Raleigh Williams: And we actually had our welder put some prison bars in the bus. And we built an experience out of an old school bus because we could park that right outside of our location. And because it’s a bus, I mean the city can’t, there’s no certificate of occupancy that the city doesn’t control you doing anything with a bus.

[00:39:21] Raleigh Williams: And just to bridge that first little gap time, as we were getting compliant with the city, we built that escape bus. That, and then we ultimately started taking that to corporate events and doing all but it, it was a super stressful time because we were running out of cash. You know, we thought that we could get the business going with a hundred grand.

[00:39:38] Raleigh Williams: It ended up costing, you know, closer to 200 grand. And for the city inspection playbook, it’s best that they see it as a work in progress that looks like a finished product as opposed to the finished product. 

[00:39:53] Patrick Donley: The bus idea is brilliant though, like to just get people, you know, it’s just brand recognition and awareness.

[00:39:59] Patrick Donley: And I’m sure you were doing a lot of social media and outreach that way. Talk to us a little bit about the marketing of the escape room. What, because you’re really, I know that social media is an important part of kinda your business plans and strategies. Talk to me a little bit about what you did for the bus.

[00:40:17] Raleigh Williams: One of the benefits that we had in that first location that we didn’t really realize until we moved to other locations that didn’t have it. And in Utah, there’s one main freeway called I 15 that kind of connects all of Salt Lake and Utah County. It’s kinda like the main thoroughfare. There’s, it’s not like in Dallas you can take 12, you know, California, you take 12 different freeways to get to wherever you’re trying to get to.

[00:40:40] Raleigh Williams: In Utah, there’s only one, at least in Salt Lake and Utah County. And we had the good fortune of having a location that was right on the freeway and we were right next to the traffic source, like the physical traffic source, not just the online traffic source that you try to do when you’re doing social media stuff.

[00:40:56] Raleigh Williams: And because we were right next to the traffic source when we put our sign and our escape bus, you know, right on the side of the road says Alcatraz Escape Games book here, Alcatraz escape games.com, it made it so we never really had to learn how to do paid advertising, you know, Facebook ads, any of those things.

[00:41:14] Raleigh Williams: And so we were spoiled in a way that we didn’t understand. And then when we tried to build our second location, we thought that it would be smart to save on what we’re paying on a per-square-foot basis in order to be further away from the freeway. And what we found was then you had to do advertising because you have no traffic, you have no physical traffic, so then you have to crack the digital traffic game.

[00:41:36] Raleigh Williams: And so we were struggling for a bit on that second location that we built until there was an ax throwing business that was shutting down because the owners were moving to a new state. And we looked at potentially buying it, but we didn’t want to relocate. We thought it would be cheaper for us to just build one ourselves than buying theirs.

[00:41:57] Raleigh Williams: But the deal that we ultimately came to is they had done a really good job with social media and we had never really had to flex that muscle. We bought their social media pages and their email us, we basically bought their media assets, social media and otherwise. Then we started taking their social media and pushing our location to their followers.

[00:42:18] Raleigh Williams: And like the, you know, the avatar of someone who goes to an ax throwing business is very similar to someone who goes to an escape room, trampoline park business. That became the playbook that we used as we went to new locations. If there wasn’t a physical traffic sort, like we have some locations that are right next to target and traffic’s never the issue there.

[00:42:36] Raleigh Williams: Cause Right. Target drives all the traffic that you need. It’s just a matter of capturing them. But some of the locations that are cheaper on a per square foot basis, you know, you’re getting that cheap rent because the location has less foot traffic. And so the way that we’ve learned to supplement that is we’ll go out and we’ll buy media assets, you know, whether it’s Facebook groups or Instagram pages.

[00:42:57] Raleigh Williams: Like, you know, we have a location in Texas and so we have Facebook groups from like local moms that are talking about where to do their birthday party, that type of thing. And 85% of the content isn’t trampoline park related, but 15% of it is. And you know, it’s, you know, we’ve tried to hire social media people in-house and you know, event people in house and the best bang for our buck has been buying media assets that have already grown to some point, and then scaling them from there.

[00:43:27] Patrick Donley: Were you guys bringing in outside investors at all or was it just your brother and the guy, your friend from KPMG?

[00:43:34] Raleigh Williams: For the first. Alcatraz, it was the three of us. We ultimately bought the KPMG partner out. And then what we were doing from a location by location standpoint is we would find an operator that really wanted to operate the business and my brother and I would get basically 50% of the business to build it and kind of get it off the ground.

[00:43:57] Raleigh Williams: And then the operator would do the operations and also bring the capital for the other 50%, however, they wanted to do it. And these were people that we knew pretty well. And so the first couple we self-funded, and then after that what we realized is that my brother and I weren’t great operators and we’re both pretty O C D, this.

[00:44:18] Raleigh Williams: It’s a pretty cash heavy business. We never liked the idea of having a general manager a couple states away, even if they made 80 or a hundred grand a year. We wanted somebody with ownership. That had skin in the game, we found that they were better operators if they felt like they were going to lose their friends and family’s money if they didn’t show up to work.

[00:44:37] Raleigh Williams: We looked at franchising, we looked at a couple of different growth paths, but for us, we had enough people that really wanted to be in the business and take over the operational piece that we didn’t want to do, that it made sense for us to grow that way. And so the last couple parks that we did, some that happened right before covid, were basically some combination of, you know, we got, I guess, sweat equity to let them use our brand, our processes, and to build it for them, and then they run it and raise the capital for it was kind of the structure that made the most sense for us.

[00:45:12] Patrick Donley: I want to hear about your thoughts on finding the right partners, like how you find them, and then just what kind of qualities you were looking for. Were you, I mean, I presume you’re not just taking anybody to be a partner who wants to operate an escape room. So what were you looking for and how did you find them?

[00:45:27] Raleigh Williams: At this stage, we had grown to, we were really helping them build, you know, 40 to 55,000 square foot escape room, trampoline park, like a big entertainment facility, not just a, you know, five or 6,000 square foot escape room business. Everyone that we had as an operator that operated outside of Utah, so we had some in, we had one in Arizona, Dallas, and then Salt, and then Utah were kind of the three states that we operated out of.

[00:45:53] Raleigh Williams: I think the first important thing that I’ve kept to this day, even as some of those partnerships have gone away, is we wanted to make sure that they always had real skin in the game outside of just sweat equity, right? Like sweat equity was always a component of it, but we wanted to make sure in every partnership that I do, I want there to be a material amount of skin in the game from the people that I’m partnering with and material.

[00:46:21] Raleigh Williams: It just has to be material to them. And so sometimes I’ll have an operator that puts $10,000 in, which feels like their whole world will collapse if they lose it. And we’ve had people that put $4 million in, right? And so it just has to be skin in the game, I think is the most, I think it aligns the incentives the best.

[00:46:42] Raleigh Williams: Charlie Munger says, you know, show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcomes. And I think you get really wonky incentives when you have people that are simply there because basically some no money down way that they’ve gotten themselves involved. And I tried to eliminate that as much as I can.

[00:47:00] Raleigh Williams: Obviously when I did the trampoline, when I started the escape room business, I had no capital, but I was moving my family and moving in with my in-laws and leaving $180,000 a year salary. So like I had, I think it was obvious that like I wasn’t going anywhere, that I was burning the boats in some fashion.

[00:47:18] Raleigh Williams: I think that’s the biggest one. And then outside of that, I have a few things and they all start with hs. So that way I can remember them first is the humility of the person. How teachable are they? Particularly when they’re talking about something that I think it’s great to have people that aren’t necessarily humble within their domain of expertise.

[00:47:37] Raleigh Williams: Right? If me and you are talking about a real estate thing versus a small business acquisition, I feel confident that like I can have an opinion that I don’t need to be taught a massive amount on a small business thing. But if the conversation flips to the real estate play, right? Like I need to understand that my expertise carries different weight in different areas of what we’re talking about.

[00:47:59] Raleigh Williams: And I think that’s important. Humility, horsepower. I like to always know just how smart people are. I also like to know what they’re reading. Are they reading? Like if they’re looking to try to optimize. So humility, horsepower. Their home life is something that I didn’t used to focus on, but I do now.

[00:48:18] Raleigh Williams: Basically I’ve been in enough partnerships where the entrepreneur or the partner is great, but the spouse creates disharmony in a lot of different ways because it’s, you know, 5 0 2 and they should be home or, you know, like, I like to spend some time go out to dinner or see who’s deciding, who’s eating what, you know, you either get, and just understanding what the dynamic is as best possible hunger, like what they’re ultimately looking to get out of it.

[00:48:45] Raleigh Williams: And then hobbies is another one that I’ve run into a fair amount where like my personal rule is there are very time intensive like I would say golf and hunting. Golf and hunting are like two hobbies that are like if you’re a scratch golfer then you shouldn’t be the operator of my software business.

[00:49:05] Raleigh Williams: Because what’s required to run a successful software business doesn’t comport with keeping your scratch game golf up or getting your hunting tag for elk hunting this year where you leave for two months because you got the tag or whatever that is. I’ve found that those five areas plus skin in the game, I think is as close as I’ve gotten to like a strong solution and you know, whatever.

[00:49:27] Raleigh Williams: I still make mistakes and there’s still things that come up, tragedies happen and everything gets shifted. They could check all the boxes, have skin in the game and then you know, a child gets sick or a spouse gets massively sick and just priorities get reshuffled overnight and. You just try to but usually if someone’s humble and they’re fair to deal with, then usually we’ve been able to come to resolutions even to make sure that everyone gets treated fairly.

[00:49:56] Patrick Donley: Those are great. I’ve not heard those before. The five Hs. I really I like those a lot. I wanted to hear, once you started scaling it, did you and your brother have a similar vision for where you wanted to take the company? Because I think that can be a tricky thing, having partners that aren’t on the same page.

[00:50:13] Raleigh Williams: That’s why we ended up buying out. My partner that was from K P M G is, he was more of a lifestyle guy and he was an avid golfer. My brother and I were both pretty adamant that we wanted to do a big thing and that we felt like this was the window to do it in. And so from a vision perspective, Both of us kind of felt like the entertainment business was really like a covered real estate play.

[00:50:39] Raleigh Williams: We thought prior to Covid, if you looked at the pitch deck for, you know, the last couple deals that we did, it was all Amazon is hollowing out the retail sector of real estate. You have all of these big box places, 55, 70,000 anchor tenants that are going to go under because Amazon is putting them out of business.

[00:50:59] Raleigh Williams: You have Toys R us, Gordon’s, I mean, you know, pick whatever the sector is. We want to go in and take at least a majority of a strip center on a concept that will cash flow. And then use that business that we put into that real estate to ultimately buy the strip center or the center through either an SBA loan.

[00:51:21] Raleigh Williams: If we own over 51%, if we’re taking 50% of the gross leaseable area, or basically become the anchor tenants in these real estate centers that are getting hollowed out from Amazon and use that as the foot and to the door to buy these pieces of real estate that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to purchase, we would’ve no unique advantage.

[00:51:41] Raleigh Williams: We felt like the unique advantage is we could become our own anchor, run those businesses, the cash flow pretty well and take over America was kind of the idea as we got into building out three or four of them. We realized that building these centers out is pretty difficult and time consuming and it’s all custom and it’s not building a storage facility ground up.

[00:52:05] Raleigh Williams: You know, you’re taking these old spaces that are built in the eighties and everything has, so the complexities of actually building them became harder. And then a couple months after Covid hit and we felt like there was a risk in the business that we had never thought about. You know, the story that we would tell investors that we would tell ourselves was, you know, in oh 7, 0 8, Disney raised their prices.

[00:52:27] Raleigh Williams: Like no matter what happens and the markets kids, you know, parents will still take their kids to go to a birthday party, people will still go to local centers. Maybe they won’t go to the trek of Disney and you know, spend 10 grand, but they’ll still be spending a couple hundred bucks a month on entertainment.

[00:52:42] Raleigh Williams: The movie theaters still do well, all that stuff. And Covid just was the perfect reason why that’s not true. 

[00:52:50] Patrick Donley: How did that affect you? Had you already started to exit at that point when Covid hit, or you said 2021 was your exit, so how did that affect the sale of, and I know that you kind of sold the company off in pieces, correct?

[00:53:04] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. When we bought our first partner out, he was helping me on the operational piece. And in the summer of 2019, I started marketing the escape room business to sell just myself. You know, I got the business ready to sell and I started going to some of the big operators of trampoline parks, was where like private equity was, that’s where the big money was in that segment.

[00:53:28] Raleigh Williams: And so I started going to trampoline park businesses and I would say, Hey listen, we put in an escape room right next to our trampoline park. It’s synergistic with your customers. You should buy us, buy our concept and start putting it in. I had started this, the marketing process. Of the escape room business.

[00:53:45] Raleigh Williams: And so we sold two locations of the escape room business to some guys that owned and operated haunted houses. It was supposed to close on April 2nd, COVID hit March 15th. And so we were two weeks off from Covid, but we were able to ultimately close it like in June and we took a couple hundred thousand dollars haircut to get the deal closed.

[00:54:05] Raleigh Williams: And so I had kind of started the, as we were building these centers out, you know, I had moved to Texas to build a couple locations in Texas. And you know, my brother and I basically were in alignment of like, Hey let’s have these two last builds be our last. Like, let’s not do this again. Let’s operate these however long we need to operate them for.

[00:54:23] Raleigh Williams: But let’s start the process of getting out however that looks, whether that’s multiple transactions, a single transaction, like I was kind of ready. I felt like it was the best path for me to leave law and I was ready to move on to my next thing, right. And my brother had been doing it for longer than I had.

[00:54:42] Raleigh Williams: He was coming up on his 40th birthday. He is a couple years older than me and I think the, for him, the prospect of running kids’ birthday parties as a 50 year old, you know, seemed anathema to him. 

[00:54:54] Patrick Donley: I can appreciate that. I wanted to understand, did you guys own the real estate in all cases or did you own some?

[00:55:02] Raleigh Williams: We owned some in lease, some we owned some lease some and then had options to purchase some. And the first location that we built, we owned that real estate and we did it through an SBA loan. And going through that process, we were like, we were trying to optimize as much as we could to find locations that we could get an option to purchase the real estate on like we had done in our first location.

[00:55:25] Raleigh Williams: So we had started building some, we, you know, we built a bar in downtown Salt Lake because we had an option to purchase the real estate. So that was like, that was the long term play. And it probably could have played out if we had a third partner that really loved operating those businesses. Cause you know, they’re operationally intense businesses.

[00:55:45] Raleigh Williams: You have to deal with customer service and you know, you gotta make sure it’s open every single day. And it takes a fair amount of, you know, relatively low wage workers to run those things. And you know, so you get your own, you get a certain type of person that’s looking for those type of jobs and you know, they come with their own set of problems that you have to deal with.

[00:56:06] Patrick Donley: Yeah. So the exit was 26 million that you split then with your brother? Is that, how am I getting the numbers right? 

[00:56:14] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, various, I mean, in some locations we had some capital partners, but it was all location by location. And so, and the real estate, we had sold the location and we had kept the real estate.

[00:56:25] Raleigh Williams: So that was to a real estate buyer. And so 26 million divided. My brother and I were always in, in every park. We were always the majority owner of the park. And then sometimes we had capital partners that were involved, but he and I split the lion share of it. 

[00:56:43] Patrick Donley: You made more than you would’ve made as had you continue to practice law. Right? 

[00:56:48] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. I tried to tell that to my dad any chance every Thanksgiving, and that’s why I’ve, I get invited to those Thanksgivings less and less now. 

[00:56:56] Patrick Donley: I like your advice actually On handling the holidays on, you know, take a trip somewhere and you don’t have to deal with in-laws, you don’t have to deal with all the drama of that.

[00:57:04] Patrick Donley: I think it’s actually really good advice. 

[00:57:07] Raleigh Williams: I got more hate on that than I was expecting. People were like, you should, you know, resolve your issues and whatever teachers own, you can’t be sending your thoughts out there without expecting some pushback, but no. Yeah it’s been much better than practicing law for me and I think.

[00:57:25] Raleigh Williams: You know, I have a lot of good buddies that are still practicing law, and I think most of them are kind of now getting to a point. You know, I’ve been out of law school for eight years and so a lot of the people that graduated with me, they’re kind of coming up on partner and a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them have reached out as they’ve now reached the thing they’ve reached the end of the marathon that they set for themselves eight or nine years ago to become partner at a big law firm.

[00:57:51] Raleigh Williams: And, you know, it feels, there’s no sense of relief. It’s like the winner of the pie eating contest is more pie. It’s a whole new process, but their opportunity cost is higher now. You know, they basically understand that they’re probably never getting out of that game and their best chance is to do like what you talk about and, you know, become an investor.

[00:58:11] Raleigh Williams: Like they’re, you know, they’re never going to be an entrepreneur that’s running something, you know, the c e o of something. They’re going to be a passive investor that hopefully makes good bets along the way and get some passive income. 

[00:58:23] Patrick Donley: Yeah, it’s really tough to do once your lifestyle creeps up and you’ve got the house and the cars and it’s really tough to make a move to downscale your life especially if you’re married and kids, like that’s a tough transition to do.

[00:58:36] Patrick Donley: I’ve got a buddy right now that’s trying to do it in his fifties and it’s a hard go, I think. 

[00:58:40] Raleigh Williams: Wow. Yeah. I mean, so few. I mean, in your fifties, I mean, I guess if you have kids out, I guess then you kind of get one last window because you have kids leaving school and kind of going off and you can start doing your own thing again.

[00:58:53] Raleigh Williams: Right. But yeah, it’s a tough racket. 

[00:58:56] Patrick Donley: We’ve hit about an over an hour here, actually about an hour and a half with all the technical difficulties. I want to get into all these questions, but maybe we do like a round two to like get into like all the other ventures and DealMaven and is that cool with you?

[00:59:09] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, man, that’s no problem. 

[00:59:12] Patrick Donley: All right, cool. Yeah, because there’s a ton of stuff here. I mean, really good stuff and I mean, we just kind of covered the escape room, that’s just kind of chapter one. 

[00:59:20] Raleigh Williams: We’re just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. 

[00:59:23] Patrick Donley: Exactly. Yeah. So you got time for a quick fire round? 

[00:59:26] Raleigh Williams: Sure. 

[00:59:28] Patrick Donley: Okay, let’s do it.

[00:59:29] Patrick Donley: Aside from practicing law, what was your worst job? 

[00:59:33] Raleigh Williams: My worst job when I was 14 years old, I had a buddy that rolled my parents’ car and so in order to pay my parents back I had to shovel horse stalls, 80 horse stalls every day for two years. And that’s cleaning, you know, picking horse stalls and cleaning up horse manure every day after sports practice was a pretty tough, nothing’s been as bad as that.

[01:00:01] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s pretty rough. This is a question I think you like to ask your potential partners. What are you currently reading? 

[01:00:07] Raleigh Williams: Most of my reading has been around exit stuff, so, but I actually have restarted The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And what I read more now than business stuff outside of doing research for writing this book is, I’d say mindfulness, kind of like the Power of Now is one that I’m rereading currently by Eckhart Tole of just like being present and you know, not torturing yourself by living in the future of the past.

[01:00:34] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s a good one. Any others that you like along those lines? 

[01:00:38] Raleigh Williams: The Untethered Soul has been a really good one. My daughter is eight now and we have a rule that she has to read eight pages a day before she can use her iPad or do any of that stuff. And so we just finished The Alchemist together, which is less about, I mean it’s a little bit divergent that from Power of Now and that kind of stuff, but it’s kind of along the line, the personal journey, that type of stuff.

[01:01:03] Patrick Donley: Very cool. How about entrepreneurial Hero? 

[01:01:06] Raleigh Williams: So my entrepreneurial hero is probably Charlie Munger. Who was Warren Buffett’s kind of investing partner? He was a lawyer, which I like. I think the thing that I like about both of those guys is I just think that they have always been wise and have always counseled for kind of a long-term view.

[01:01:29] Raleigh Williams: And I think that they’ve left a lot of money on the table that their counterparts have taken just because I think that they’ve always stayed very true to their principals and I think they sleep well at night, you know, and I think they’ve always, and I think they’ve always kind of done that. 

[01:01:48] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I don’t know if you knew, but our whole podcast,The Investor’s Podcast Network is based on Buffet and Charlie Munger.

[01:01:54] Patrick Donley: Just the original podcast was just Stig Brodersen and Preston Pysch. Just inter talking about Charlie Munger and Orton Buffet and Oh, no way. It’s called, we study billionaires. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s totally up our alley. And Port Charlie’s Almanac sits on my coffee table pretty much all the time.

[01:02:12] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, I have it’s a harder read than it should be, but then they need to get an audio version of that at some point. But it’s a great one. 

[01:02:19] Patrick Donley: It’s a good one though. Definitely a good one. So Raleigh, this has been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed you sharing here. And do you have any kind of parting thoughts of somebody that’s maybe at a job they hate that’s thinking about taking a jump into, whether it’s real estate or an entrepreneurial venture?

[01:02:33] Patrick Donley: Any kind of parting words of wisdom? 

[01:02:36] Raleigh Williams: I think if you’re at a job that you hate, you have to understand that the next step of the journey. Is different than what has gotten you to the point where you’re at in the sense that failure is part of the process in a way that it never has. You know, you can go and be great at school, and school kind of dissuades you from taking a risk or failing at something, and I think the next step of your journey will be one that is less well trodden.

[01:03:09] Raleigh Williams: You’ll do it mostly by yourself and it will be much more difficult than you expect it to be. But at the on the backside of it, you’ll be glad that you did it because if you knew everything that you had to go through, you probably would just stay at your job. So for our 

[01:03:27] Patrick Donley: listeners that want to reach out to you or learn more about you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

[01:03:31] Patrick Donley: I think you’ve got a newsletter too. You’ve got a podcast. Tell us about some of those. 

[01:03:36] Raleigh Williams: Yeah, so we have a newsletter called Dealmaven.io where we break down businesses that are for sale, kind of talk about private equity stuff. We do research reports on kind of trending topics, and so deal maven.io is a newsletter and also community of kind of entrepreneurs and people looking to get their business ready for sale and people that are looking to get into the acquisition game.

[01:03:58] Raleigh Williams: Twitter is probably where I’m, where I personally am the most active. I think my handle is the Raleigh will, and so I’m always on there. If you find me on LinkedIn or something else, you’ll probably get an assistant or something that’s responding, but on Twitter I’m usually the one writing it and responding.

[01:04:16] Patrick Donley: And then did you have a podcast that, did you mention a podcast that you have? 

[01:04:20] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. Yeah. We have a podcast called The DealMaven Podcast, where we kind of break down business news, kind of small business acquisition stuff, private equity stuff. 

[01:04:30] Patrick Donley: Cool. I’ll put links to all this in the show notes and this has been really fun.

[01:04:33] Patrick Donley: I really appreciate your time and best of luck in all your ventures. I’m excited to maybe do round two and hear more of what you’re up to. 

[01:04:40] Raleigh Williams: Yeah. Let me know and we’ll make it happen. Appreciate you having me. Thanks for spending the time. 

[01:04:44] Patrick Donley: Yeah, thank you Raleigh. 

[01:04:45] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode.

[01:04:48] Patrick Donley: I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon. 

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