For those of you that are new here, every week I send what I call a 1x1x1.
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One learning, reminder, or interesting thought from my week.
One interesting find/tool from my week.
One image from my life.

Let's dive in 👇

Interesting thought from the week

OMG OMG! Our local ski park Mt. Bachelor just went up for sale.

This is super interesting to me. I mean, how cool would it be to own your local ski park with the right investor group/partner?!

I actually don't think it would be that cool. I think it would be a total NIGHTMARE. I'll gladly pay my $1000 a year for my ski pass so I can ski all day and not have to worry about the business all night.

But as per usual, I went down the rabbit hole to understand what it looks like to buy one these massive ski destinations.

If that's interesting to you, keep reading 👇

I have no experience buying ski parks, but I think the valuations for one of these parks (like any business) would be primarily based around 4 key criteria:

1. Revenue Streams: Lift ticket sales, season passes, lodging, food, and retail.
2. Profitability: Net operating income (NOI) and EBITDA margins.
3. Real Estate: Land value, development potential (this is a big one), and existing infrastructure.
4. Location: Proximity to major markets and tourist destinations.

My first thought - benchmarks. What are other ski areas selling for?
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One notable ski resort sale in the past decade is Mammoth Resorts in California. In 2017, the company was acquired by a partnership between Aspen Skiing Co. and KSL Capital Partners for around $1.5 billion.

This deal included several ski resorts such as Mammoth Mountain, Snow Summit, Bear Mountain, and June Mountain.

This sale reflected the value of combining popular ski areas, offering strong revenue streams, and holding significant real estate assets, particularly in high-demand regions.

Bachelor will go for a fraction of this but it's a helpful benchmark for me.

I also looked at the activity from Vail Resorts. They have recently purchased several mid-sized resorts in the range of $50-$200 million.

Bachelor is no mid-sized resort. It is the 6th largest ski resort in North America, with more than 4,300 acres of lift-accessible terrain.

My next thought - historicals. Bachelor sold in 2001. What did that look like?

In 2001, Powdr Corp. acquired a majority stake in Mt. Bachelor by purchasing shares from individual shareholders. They bought the shares at $20,100 each, securing around 54% of the company. The exact number of shares purchased hasn't been disclosed in the sources I found but the deal involved Powdr assuming approximately $10 million in debt. to get the deal done. There were also a number of competing offers in 2001. There resort has only increased in popularity so it will likely be receiving a number of competing offers again. This dive was super unhelpful but I did think it was interesting.

My third thought - let's estimate the revenues.

Let's just look at winter revenue from ticket and season pass sales for the purposes of benchmarking.
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Assumptions:

• Average Daily Skiers: 3,000 to 5,000 on average, peaking at 8,000 on big days (hello fasttracks).
• Season Length: Approximately 150 days.
• Lift Ticket Prices: Average daily lift ticket price around $120.
• Season Pass Sales: Assuming 10,000 season passes at $1,000 each.
• Percentage of Season Pass Holders: I'm assuming 50% of the average daily visitors.

Calculations:

1. Daily Lift Tickets (Non-Season Pass Holders):
   • Since 50% of visitors are season pass holders, the remaining 50% buy daily lift tickets.
   • Average daily skiers purchasing lift tickets:
     • Minimum: 3,000 skiers/day * 50% = 1,500 skiers/day
     • Maximum: 5,000 skiers/day * 50% = 2,500 skiers/day
   • Revenue from daily lift tickets over the season:
     • Minimum: 1,500 skiers/day * 150 days * $120 = $27 million
     • Maximum: 2,500 skiers/day * 150 days * $120 = $45 million
2. Season Pass Revenue:
   • 10,000 passes * $1,000 = $10 million

Total Estimated Revenue:

• Minimum: $27 million (daily tickets) + $10 million (season passes) = $37 million annually
• Maximum: $45 million (daily tickets) + $10 million (season passes) = $55 million annually

This is a rough estimate and doesn’t include additional revenue streams like, food, retail, and lessons, which would significantly increase the total.

The last thing I'll share when it comes to estimating a purchase price for Mt. Bachelor - it's in Deschutes County. It's the only ski park in the USA that is in a county that is growing by 10,000 residents every 3 years. No other ski park has that.

So based on all this high level info, what do I think Mt. Bachelor would sell for?

I can almost guarantee it will sell for between $200 - 400 million. Obviously there are so many things to consider for the actual purchase price, but I'm pretty confident in this range.
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So to all those local skiers that are hoping a large corporation like Vail won't buy it, I say I'm sorry. I'm just as bummed as you are. But hey, maybe we'll finally get night skiing and chair lifts that don't run on backup diesel engines :)

Interesting find/tool of the week

​Webflow's functionality for gated content and user accounts just keeps getting better. I remember when we had to build this stuff ten years ago for tens of thousands of dollars. Now you can do it for $29 a month with Webflow. Makes testing business concepts so much faster.

Image from my life

Brown pow. If you know you know.

See you all next week!