Brought to you by Zander Insurance. Compare rates from top-term life insurance companies in seconds at Zander.com. So me and my wife, I was looking for some advice. We want to take our family.
We have three small children. Our dream is to buy a Canadian fishing lodge and run that from about May to November every year. The issue that I'm running to just because I'm new with this is trying to come up with a figure not how to come up with a down payment or something like that. Some of these lodges range from $250,000 to millions of dollars and trying to figure out what's the best way to go about doing something like that.
It depends on how much money you have to spend. You don't have any money to put it down payment down. I think I could probably come up with between me and my wife and ask my parents for a small amount to pay back. I could probably come up with maybe around 100 grand, but it seems like that won't take me very far.
What do you make? Right now I make about 90,000. What do you do? I'm in construction.
I don't like I'm away from my kids. Do you ever work in a Canadian fishing lodge? No, but I'm really, really good with my hands, really knowledgeable about fishing and hunting. I've been doing both.
And see the wrong knowledge about business? Zero knowledge about business, yes sir. About fishing lodges, 90% business, 10% fishing. I'm just going off of what I've talked to.
I've got a couple mutual friends now, of course, and tight maintenance process of owners up there. I've talked to them. Both the ones I talked to are, they've been, they've owned a lodge now for about 10, 15 years, and they didn't do this before, didn't run business before. One of them was in construction just like me.
I'll tell you, I've never been to a Canadian fishing lodge. I don't know what that is. Is it something, do you live on the property, like a bed and a breakfast where you live there, and you provide all of this for your guests and you're living on the property? Yeah, we would live on the property with my family.
And what we're looking for, we're not going to provide the American plan, which is food and everything. It's more of just your coming up there. Your fishing will take you, guide your fishing trip, will guide your hunting trip, show you where to go, stuff like that. But we're not going to provide the American plan, which is all your meals included.
So just play this out with me. So you said these could range from 250,000 plus, right? All the way up to a couple million. So let's just pretend.
You said, okay, I'm looking at the 250,000 dollar plan. My family lives on the property. I put 100,000 down. So we've got the place, we're living there, and now we're starting to rent out the experience to guests.
What happens next? What's the next step? I guess I don't know what you mean. What do you mean next?
So you've got the lodge, you purchased the property. What's the next step? How do you build out the business? How do you get people to come to you?
How do you build a product? I think the next one. Yeah, there's already an existing customer base on it because you're buying a turnkey. But a lot of the lodges up there for sale are elderly people that are trying to get out and they haven't marketed in years.
They don't do online marketing. They're only relying off of their annual return customers. Like I said, both the people I talked to that purchased the lodge in the past 10 years said it was really easy to get a lot to up their customer basis. It was really easy with simple marketing tactics.
What do they earn? What's their net profit? What are they getting out of this? I mean, I couldn't ask them that.
I'm not close enough to them to ask them exactly what they're earning. If you said I'm going to put $150,000 down, I'm going to buy a $250,000 house with $150,000. I'm going to have a $150,000 mortgage and I'm going to start a new business and I don't know anything about the business. Other than I'm not about fishing and I talk to three people who said it's a good idea.
The elderly people are going to owner finance the $150 and hope you make a go of it. Are you 27 or 29? 28. Almost like I've done this.
I'm your old ugly uncle that's 64 that loves you. You are about 90% dream and about 10% reality in talking to you. You have no freaking idea what you're getting into. You just think you do and it's very romantic with rainbows and skittles and unicorns in your head right now.
When you get up there and get dirt under your fingernails and realize this is freaking mess and what have I gotten my family into? That's about the time you're going to discover how this really works. I really would love for you to go work at one for one of these people, operate it for them as a part of the purchase plan before you close on the deal, like run it for a year and see the numbers and see what is wrong with this because the only impression you have is all positive. There are three rules of business Caleb.
It's going to take twice as long as you think. It's going to cost twice as much as you think and you're not the exception. Those are the three rules of business. The way you're painting this is you are using fantasy language, not reality language and it scares me for you.
I'm afraid you're going to turn this dream into a nightmare if you're not real careful. I really want you to get some reality on you in this thing and get under the rainbows and the skittles and find out what the flip is really going on up there. Why is it that there seems to be a lot of these for sale? There's a problem here.
I really want to go work up there. I want you to take your family up there on vacation for three weeks, find an old couple that wants to sell a $250,000 one, write down a contract that says I'm going to work for you for a year at the end of that. I'm going to close on this. If I find out things to be the right thing, be the way that you say they are and if I can get financing or if you provide me financing.
What's it mean for you to be doing business in another country? You're an immigrant. I don't know what it means for an American to immigrate permanently and buy a business in Canada. I have no idea how to do that.
I do know it's probably more difficult than it was 12 months ago. You probably got some issues there. I really want to understand the business better than you are doing. The way I always ask myself when I'm going into something as a business person, would I hire me to do that?
If the answer is I don't know what the flip I'm doing, no, I wouldn't hire me to do that, then that tells me not to go into that space until I learn some more about it. I'm 100% sure you don't know what the flip you're doing on this. You can fish. No numbers.
I don't doubt that. But you've never run a business of any kind and you're stepping into this. I'm not trying to be a dream killer. I love killing nightmares though.
I love killing nightmares. I want you to go forward with this slowly, carefully and much more wisely. And then while you're doing that, work like a crazy man and pile up some cash and come up with your down payment and get one of the old people to own their financing. Because I don't think a bank's going to touch us with a 10 foot bowl dude.
And that's probably good for you that they won't. So guys, the wonderful thing about America is that we live in the free enterprise system. And the wonderful thing about America is that 54% of the gross domestic product is brought to you by small businesses. All the goods and services total up, over half of them are delivered by small businesses.
People like Caleb who started something. So I love encouraging the free enterprise system. I also spent 20 years coaching over 20,000 small businesses through our entire leadership brand. And I see all the things that go wrong when you're doing this.
So you're not the exception. It's going to take twice as long as it's going to cost twice as much. Those are the three rules and they do apply. They apply to me.
You're not the exception. When I get ready to go into, when I get ready to go into, we're going to open an app. We're working on one for Dr. John Deloney right now.
Let me tell you what, our projections on that are known as a guess. We have no idea what the stupid app's going to do. And we need to build out our business model as if the thing does nothing and then when it does something be pleasantly crushed. Yeah.
And so, and you can get digital advice, but everybody's got a dead cam opinion. They're like armpits. I stink. Oh my God.
Caleb needs to invest his first investment needs to be in your book. Let me send him a centimontory leadership and send him build a business you love. I want you to do this. I want you to do it in such a way Caleb that doesn't kill you.
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