Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –
My name's Connor. I'll send you a weekly email covering ideas to help start or grow your business.
You get a lot of emails already. So, these emails are designed to be skimmed. No need to read the whole thing, just find 1 cool thing you enjoyed. 🧠 ☕️
Today's Outline:
Tax-Free Billions
Stealing Employees
$10M Meat Chips
Dog Parks
Did someone forward you this email? If so, you can subscribe below:
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.
Business hack:
• Skip the overseas recruitment agencies
• Find companies in your industry on LinkedIn who have overseas employees listed on their companies profile (there are a lot)
• Poach them
• Steal competitors best practices & SOPs— Connor Gross (@c_gro)
Apr 18, 2023
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.
Carnivore Snax growth on Shopify;
2020 Kickstarter - $200k
2021 - $950k (open 7 months)
2022 - $3.6 mill
2023 - $10 million run rate— Mark Ritz (@ritzfit)
Apr 16, 2023
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:
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.
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
PS – Want to chat 1:1?
I'm opening one consulting call for readers of this weeks newsletter readers.
2 Areas I know about: E-commerce (Amazon & DTC), Buying & Managing Commercial Real Estate
The goal is simple. You show up with specific questions and leave with actionable steps.
For Biz Brainstorms readers, I'm only charging 50% of what I normally charge. So if you're interested, you can book here → (scheduling link gets sent after payment)