Tax-Free Piggybank, $10M Meat Chips, & Dog parks

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor. I'll send you a weekly email covering ideas to help start or grow your business.

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Today's Outline:

• Tax-Free Billions

• Stealing Employees

• $10M Meat Chips

• Dog Parks

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The $5B Tax-Free Piggybank:

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, famously used a Roth IRA to invest in Facebook back in 2004.

First of all – What is a Roth IRA?

Here's Chat GPT explaining a Roth IRA to a 10 year old in under 50 words

Back when Thiel first invested, the annual contribution limit for a Roth IRA was $3,000 (instead of $6,000 today) for investors under the age of 50. However, Thiel was able to take advantage of a loophole that allowed him to use that $3,000 to buy Paypal stock which became worth millions upon his sale. From there he parlayed those millions into other investments including a $500,000 investment in Facebook back in 2004.

His investment is now rumored to be worth over $5 billion. Tax. Free.

Despite the limit of $6,000 per year, there are apparently over 497 individuals who have Roth IRA accounts sitting at $25M+.

Other notable examples of this happening:

Mitt Romney had an IRA worth up to $102 million in 2012, which he used for private equity funds

Mark Cuban invested in companies like Uber and Dropbox through his Roth IRA

Jeff Bezos reportedly had a Roth IRA worth more than $5 billion in 2019, likely due to buying Amazon stock with it early on.

Summary: If you're making high-risk high-return bets, it could pay very well to do that from a Roth IRA account

Stealing Overseas Employees

If you need Tier-1 level employees for less, pay attention.

The last few weeks, we've been poaching our competitors overseas employees for our real estate companies. And it's simple.

This week we made 3 offers to new hires in Bangladesh, El Salvador, & the Phillipines.

2 of the 3 came from making offers directly over LinkedIn.

With this approach you're getting high quality talent, competitors best practices & usually only paying $1,000-2,000/month.

Btw, probably smart to keep a low profile on LinkedIn 🙂

$10 Million Carnivore Snacks:

Ever wish your Lays potato chips were actually… chicken?

Well, it turns out a lot of people do.

Mark Ritz was able to rebrand beef jerky as a meat-only chip and is now year 4 into scaling his e-commerce company, Carnivore Snax, into nearly a $10M brand.

Mark timed the launch perfectly, launching the product right during the peak demand for the trending Carnivore Diet, where the individual can only eat meat:

As someone who has tried the carnivore diet for a few weeks, I love the idea. This diet has virtually no snacks available (aside from Jerky).

And this meat snack has quickly overtaken the vegan counterpart.

Lessons here:

• Getting on a trend early to "own" a market almost always pays well

• Rebranding an old favorite (jerky) can make you stand out

Profiting Off Dog Parks:

If you have cash and want to invest in a specific area, regardless of the asset, you're looking for something called a "covered land play". You're paying for the land for future development without caring about the current asset on it. Well, here's one of my favorite covered land plays:

Membership Dog parks.

Why are they great?

• Low-maintenance operations

• Low cost (turf + gates)

• Subscription revenue

The photo above is from the DOG PPL in Santa Monica where it costs $120 per month to get in and an additional $25/dog.

Assume 200 members (I think they have more) + 3 food trucks @ $500/mo leases and you have a high margin $25k+/month business while you draw attention to the area to be developed.

There are other examples throughout the U.S. like:

1. Canine Commons Dog Park in Greenfield Wisconsin – an annual membership fee + daily fee for non-members. They offer training classes, dog grooming services, and hosts events like dog washes and pet adoption events.

2. The Cosmo Dog Park in Gilbert Arizona – charges a daily fee for access to the park, as well as fees for use of the park's agility course and dog wash station. The park also hosts events like "Barktoberfest," a dog-friendly beer festival, which can generate additional revenue.

Until next time ✌️

-Connor

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