The Under Canvas Co-Founder: Why $3 Million Of EBITDA Was Worth Over $100 Million | Sarah Dusek 99
RSS Feed Sarah Dusek had built Under Canvas to roughly $3 million of EBITDA when a private equity buyer took a majority stake at a valuation north of $100 million. Michael Russell opens the episode by asking what they were actually buying. Her answer is two words: embedded EBITDA.
In this episode, Sarah explains how Under Canvas came to own both the real estate and the operating company as a single business with almost no bricks and mortar, and why that structure is unusual in hospitality. Michael presses her on whether glamping is destined to commoditize, given how little it takes to put tents on a field, and she argues the barrier to entry is lower than a comparable hotel while the operating complexity is about a hundred times harder. He also gets her to break down the economics of the conservation lodge business she runs at Few and Far, where a single project runs $20 million to $50 million, and she says she is underwriting to a 20 percent cash-on-cash target.
There is also the night a thunderstorm flattened her camp in Yellowstone while she was living on site with two small children, and what her team managed to do before eleven o'clock that same evening. She is candid about the credit card debt and the bankruptcy she was staring down at the time, and she gives a straight tactical answer on what to do on the days you want to quit. If you are trying to build something in hospitality that does not have a comp yet, and you want to hear what that actually costs, this is that conversation.
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