Bought an $11M Ammo Company for $0

Kelly Ann Winget just bought her second ammunition company, and she bought it out of Chapter 11 without putting up any cash. The company had $11 million in assets, less than $3 million in debt and $6 million to $8 million a year in revenue. It was profitable. After a fire, its bank agreed to a sale-leaseback, then pulled the capital out of the business and forced it into bankruptcy. The owner could have sold the equipment and walked away with about $8 million. She structured a deal that keeps him running the shop, protects what the equipment would have paid him if the turnaround fails, and gives him equity if it works.

She grew up in Richardson in a fifth-generation Texas oil family, got a cease and desist at seven for selling golf balls and lemonade to golfers at Canyon Creek Country Club, and was making close to six figures part-time selling car washes in high school. She tried college, decided she was losing money sitting in the room, and went to work for operators in healthcare, demolition and oil and gas, where she watched oil hit $140 a barrel. She moved to California to help companies raise their first $1 million to $10 million, then worked in family offices, raising about $1 billion over almost 15 years, $100,000 at a time. In 2020, when a family office asked her to stop giving its investors the blunt version of what negative oil meant, she filed the formation documents for Alternative Wealth Partners the next day.

AWP works like a mutual fund of alternatives: a limited partnership for accredited investors that holds a blended portfolio of drilling projects, operating companies, real estate and venture, with about 15% set aside for opportunistic deals such as part of a sports team and private credit to consumer packaged goods companies. Her first fund closed at a little under $20 million and made about 30 acquisitions. She only invests where AWP can take control if an operator goes wrong, because her first priority is not losing capital. She explains how oil and gas, bonus depreciation and qualified opportunity zones shelter the cash flow, and why she would rather hold an asset that pays 12% to 15% than sell it.

With Lane Carrick and Ryan Harper she gets into why private equity firms lose the owners of 50- and 60-year-old family businesses, why she calls ADHD a superpower in deal making, and the doctor and lawyer who wanted $10 million for New Mexico wells their grandmother drilled in the 1950s and hadn't touched since. She also covers why the energy problem is moving and storing power rather than making it, the Boiler Room line she heard throughout her career that became the title of her book on women and wealth, and why her next fund is a qualified opportunity zone fund focused on defense and national security supply chains. Her book pick is Richard Thaler's Misbehaving.