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Meet Beau.
Beau spent 10 years coaching for Cirque du Soleil. Quidam. Totem. He even helped build Drawn to Life, the Disney collaboration down in Orlando.
Then in December 2023 he moved to Austin and did something completely different. He opened a school.
NextGen Academy is an Alpha sister school built from the ground up by a guy with zero background in children’s education.
"I come from a coaching background," he told us. "(So I…) built the plane as I flew it."
He still runs that school full time, so everything you're about to read happens after he clocks out.
For his 5-9, Beau and his partners own and manage short term rentals across 3 markets. They started during the pandemic and self-funded every single deal. 10 acres in Tennessee, 22 in New York. The plan was always to build micro resorts on it, but the permitting and zoning process had other ideas.
So in June 2025 he joined the Contrarian Academy, looking for a business to support the rental operation.
On July 31, he closed on something else entirely. 5 tiny cabins in a national forest in Texas, about 90 minutes from a major city, purchased for just shy of $2M.
Here's how he got there.
TOGETHER WITH ASK DOLLY
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For most of his search, Beau wasn't looking at resorts. He was looking at trades. Handyman shops. Cleaning companies. Businesses that would feed his existing rental operation in Texas, Tennessee, and New York.
He underwrote a bunch of them, but none of the numbers worked, and they were different enough from what he knew that he never got fully comfortable.
Then a glamping resort popped up a couple hours from his house. It was the same aesthetic he'd been chasing, with the same vendor he'd already researched, and the same real estate buy box he already used, just at a bigger scale.
The best part? It was finished. Permitted, built, operating.
"Someone already went through that pain, and I could buy that," he said. "Get the experience needed to run the thing and own the thing, and then take that experience to expand in the other markets."
He'd spent 2 years fighting a zoning process, then was able to buy his way past it in 8 months.
The lesson: Look at the thing you're trying to build from scratch and ask what it would cost to buy one that already exists. Sometimes a shortcut is an entire strategy.
Beau had never taken on partners.
Every deal before this one, he and his crew funded themselves. But this deal was bigger. Real estate plus goodwill, which meant a business came attached. He needed money he didn't have.
"The hardest thing at the beginning is you don't want to share equity. You don't want to give any piece of the pie away."
Ultimately, he gave some anyway. And what he got back wasn't just capital. He got a marketing partner. A designer. A GC. Built-in experts, running full speed at it without him.
"Allowing those members to shine and then learning from their experience, your whole group grows."
The lesson: A smaller slice of a deal that closes beats 100% of a deal that dies on the vine. Pick partners for what they know, not just what they wire.
The resort did a little less than $400K in gross revenue the year before Beau bought it.
Which is pretty good, but ancillary revenue was close to nothing. With 5 cabins in a national forest, and the nearest store 25 minutes away, there was a BIG opportunity…
Beau saw a camp store sitting practically empty.
Guests get out there, and find out they forget the marshmallows, the bug spray, the phone charger. Right now they either drive half an hour or go without. That’s margin hiding in a last-minute s’mores craving.
The lesson: When you tour a business, count what the customer already wants and can't get. That gap is usually the cheapest revenue in the building.
Beau had big plans for month one. He spent it hunting down logins.
The seller had never run this type of business before, so personal and business were tangled together. There were old partners, and accounts he'd genuinely forgotten existed. Some accounts Beau legally owned couldn't be transferred at all, because the app's terms of service wouldn't allow it.
So he kept the seller engaged through the transition just to keep the lights on while they untangled it.
Weeks later, the emails still come in. Hey, forgot about this one, you probably need access. This is why when someone buys a business in the Academy, we tell them not to change anything right away and to try and stay on good terms with the seller.
The lesson: Budget your first 30 days for account transfer archaeology. Then build your list of every login, subscription, and vendor portal before you sign, not after.
Beau's existing company has an ops manager. She's good. She could run this. She WILL run this. Just not yet.
"We would never ask the operator of our existing company to all of a sudden jump into something she's not familiar with, before we even know how the business operates."
So he's in the grind himself. Learning the rhythm, finding the friction, and figuring out which of the seller's systems to keep and which to rip out.
The resort closes to guests at the end of September for interior renovations. New floors, paint, commercial-grade fixtures that'll outlast the guests who beat on them. Beau estimates he’ll put in about half a million dollars to get everything up to par.
That shutdown window is also when he onboards his operator. No guests, no fires, full attention.
The lesson: Learn the job before you delegate the job. And if there's a natural slow season, that's your training window.
Beau's deal took 8 months from the day he found it to the day he signed. He says he came close to walking more than once, with a lot of his own money already in it.
The reason he didn't quit wasn't grit. It was people.
"I had a group of people around me going through the same things, talking me off the cliff when it was hairy."
That’s the power of the Academy. Guidance, plus accountability and support.
He still has a W2. He still has 3 markets to build in and 240 acres in New York with a wedding venue on it. He's not done, and he'd be the first to tell you that.
But now he owns the exact thing he used to dream about.
- Team Contrarian
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The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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