He Had a Panic Attack on Day 30. Then He Built a $26 Million Entertainment Empire.

Raleigh Williams was on the gym floor, heart racing, body going numb, when he called his wife and told her he thought he was dying. She Googled his symptoms. It wasn't a heart attack.

It was a panic attack. And if you know anything about Raleigh, you know the next part he says with a kind of rueful laugh: he was actually hoping it was a heart attack. Because a panic attack just meant he was too lame to handle his own life.

Thirty days into his job at a prestigious law firm — the job he'd gone to law school for, the career he was supposed to want — his body had already decided it was wrong. His brain was a few months behind.

This conversation happened live at the fifth annual Startups with Stu retreat in Saint George, Utah. Red rock country. Good hike that morning. And then Raleigh took the stage and gave one of the more honest accounts of what it actually feels like to build something from scratch when you don't know what you're doing and you don't love what you came from.

The Law Firm, the Panic Attack, and the Treadmill

Raleigh grew up thinking he'd be a lawyer. His dad was a corporate attorney. The plan made sense. BYU, then law school, then a big firm doing mergers and acquisitions. The kind of work that sounds important at dinner parties.

Thirty days in, he was staffed on a new deal by his boss. He got the email at the gym, mid-workout. He'd already taken enough pre-workout to, in his words, "sedate an elephant." And something broke.

Racing heart. Numbness. He laid down on the gym floor.

He says what stuck with him wasn't the physical panic — it was the shame. He'd been good at school. Tests, structure, high achievement. School always had terminal points. Take the exam, see the grade, move on. This job didn't. He could look down the hall and see exactly what his life would look like in ten years. And none of the lawyers he saw were people he wanted to become.

"I'm on this treadmill," he said, "and I'm not setting the pace. And it's unclear how I ever get off unless I find the courage to sidestep it somehow."

That's the thing about panic attacks that doesn't get talked about enough. They're not just stress. They're your nervous system telling you something has gone structurally wrong. Raleigh's body knew before he did.

25 Failures Before the One That Worked

He didn't quit immediately. That would make too clean a story.

For the next several months, he stayed at the firm and grasped at everything else. Faceless Instagram account. Buying tax liens. Got his real estate license. None of it worked. Each failure made the desperation a little sharper. He was also studying for the GMAT at one point, looking for a way back into the comfort of structured education — somewhere he knew the rules.

He's honest about this period in a way most founders aren't. There's a version of the entrepreneurship story where the hero sees an opportunity, bets big, wins. Raleigh's version is messier: a guy who tried a bunch of things because he was scared, and needed to feel some control of his economic situation.

Then his brother texted him a MarketWatch article. "The Unbelievably Lucrative Business of Escape Rooms."

He'd never heard of an escape room. The concept — paying someone to lock you in a room and figure out how to get out — did not make immediate sense. But he was, as he put it, "at a state of openness of: I will try anything that is not practicing law."

He went with a buddy who worked at KPMG. Did the room. Counted heads. Did the math on a napkin. Figured the margins were decent and the business wasn't that complicated to build. Three months later, he handed in his two weeks' notice and moved his family to Utah to open Alcatraz Escape Games in Draper.

Copy First, Create Later

Here's what Raleigh did that a lot of first-time founders won't admit to: he didn't invent anything.

He and his co-founder had two hypotheses. Actors make escape rooms better. Darker themes make them more intense. That was basically the product vision. For the actual puzzle sequences — how the games flowed, what the mechanics were — he emailed one of the best escape room operators in Europe and offered them five thousand dollars to license everything.

They said yes. He didn't end up using most of it. But it gave him a starting point. A blank page to copy from instead of a blank page to stare at.

"I'm not creative," he said. "I'm a lawyer. I can copy other people." He meant it as a bit of self-deprecation, but there's real strategy buried in it. Finding a market that's already working somewhere else and bringing it somewhere it doesn't exist yet — geographic arbitrage, he calls it — is a legitimate way to build. You're not creating demand. You're fulfilling demand that already exists somewhere.

He talks about TripAdvisor as an underrated research tool for this. If you look at tourist cities, especially in Europe or Asia, you can often see what's trending two or three years before it hits the US. Escape rooms were like that. Trampoline parks were like that before them. The trick is finding things that are doing well relative to how cheap and simple they are to execute. High demand, low production cost. That's the signal.

The Harry Potter Room (And the Four-Year Run Before Warner Bros. Noticed)

One of the most entertaining parts of the conversation is when Raleigh explains how they built their most popular room.

He and his partners wanted to do a magic-themed room. His partners were nervous. The obvious source material was Harry Potter — which, obviously, was Warner Bros. IP. Not theirs to use.

Raleigh's legal analysis: do it until they send a cease and desist, then stop.

They called it "Horcrux Hysteria." Harry Potter references all over the room. He hired a guy from law school who ran a Harry Potter fan club to build all the set pieces for three thousand bucks. Warner Bros. found it after four years and sent the letter. They changed it to "Wizard Hysteria" and kept running.

But that room was consistently their most popular. And the reason isn't hard to see in hindsight. Harry Potter fans don't just like the books. They want to live inside that world. You're not selling them an escape room. You're selling them an experience of something they already love. That's not a marketing trick. That's just understanding what job your product is being hired to do.

"You're riding a wave," he said, "that exists outside of you. You're not generating it."

What Actually Drove Revenue (And How Long It Took to Figure Out)

They wasted time building revenue models and throughput projections before they opened. None of them were accurate. That's basically always true, but Raleigh's version is useful because he can tell you what the actual driver turned out to be.

It wasn't marketing. It wasn't pricing. It wasn't social media.

It was rooms.

Every time they added a room, it ran at 30 to 40 percent capacity. Which looked bad at first — why build a second room if the first one isn't full? But the math was wrong. Escape room revenue is really Thursday, Friday, and Saturday revenue. Monday through Wednesday are dead no matter what. So the question isn't "are you full on your slowest days?" It's "how big is your bucket when it's raining?"

The bigger the bucket — more rooms — the more you captured during peak hours. Revenue tracked almost directly with room count. Simple once you see it. Took longer than it should have to see it.

Selling Before the Numbers Told the Truth

By 2022, Williams Entertainment Group had grown into something substantial. Escape rooms, trampoline parks, ax throwing, full bars — entertainment parks up to 55,000 square feet. They sold across nine transactions for $26 million, including real estate. He had partners and debt. Not all of it went into his pocket. But enough.

The reason he sold when he did is worth paying attention to.

His operating partner wanted to leave. Raleigh bought him out. Then he looked at himself honestly. The business had room to grow. The opportunity was still there. He wasn't taking it — not for any strategic reason, just because he didn't have the gas anymore. He'd stopped wanting to sign personal guarantees. He was checked out.

He talks about a passage from The Art of War: a general who sees an opportunity to advance and doesn't take it should be executed. Raleigh felt that in himself. And rather than wait for his lack of energy to show up in the P&L, he sold while the story was still good.

"Once the headwinds get baked into your trailing twelve months," he said, "you're stuck fixing the thing." He didn't want to fix it. So he got out.

That's a harder decision than it sounds. Most founders build their identity into the business. Raleigh's advice: periodically ask yourself, knowing what you know now, would you start this same business from scratch today? If yes, keep going. If no, figure out what that means.

What Your Business Is Actually Worth (And Why You Should Know Now)

After the exit, Raleigh started Exit OS, a business brokerage for small and mid-sized companies doing at least a million dollars in net profit. Mostly blue collar, brick and mortar businesses. His team handles the investment banking side. He says he mostly just looks good.

But the framework he teaches is genuinely useful, even if you're years from selling.

SMB businesses are valued on trailing twelve months profit, multiplied by a multiple that's usually somewhere between two and seven, depending on the type of business. The four things that move that multiple: growth rate, how operationally dependent the business is on the founder, how clean the books are, and how defensible the business is against competition.

Most founders are too deep in the operational work. That's the biggest drag on a sale price, because a buyer needs to believe the business runs without you. Fix that first.

And he makes a point that should be uncomfortable for anyone who hasn't thought about it: if you're paying yourself a hundred grand and your exit multiple is four, your business is worth four hundred thousand dollars. Is that the retirement you're building toward? If not, what needs to change — and how long are you willing to wait to change it?

Peptides, His Wife's Cancer, and Why Your Body Keeps Score

The second half of the conversation shifted into health. And it was less of a gear change than it sounds, because Raleigh's argument is that the two things aren't separate.

His wife went through cancer twice. It forced him to actually understand the medical system, navigate it, and get fluent in a part of health he'd been avoiding. That led him into Fierce Health — a telehealth business for GLP-1 medications — and then Fierce Longevity, a peptide clinic he's building out in Draper, right next to where Alcatraz used to be.

He's 36. He's been working out six days a week for fifteen years. The thing that changed in the last year, he says, is his relationship with food. GLP-1 peptides — specifically Retatrutide, a GLP-3 he calls "Reditrutide" — reset the dopamine response to eating. Made him less reactive to Haagen-Dazs. More efficient with energy at the cellular level.

He also takes BPC-157, sometimes called the "Wolverine stack," which he says has helped with lower back issues and joint recovery. He has a friend whose surgeon gave him 50/50 odds on shoulder surgery. The Wolverine stack. No surgery.

He's careful to note he's not a medical expert — his 29-year-old CEO is the one doing the real work of vetting what's safe. But the broader point he makes is worth sitting with: he had a panic attack at 30 because his body knew he was in the wrong place before he consciously did. His body, as he put it, "has a certain wisdom."

Founders who sacrifice their health for economic outcomes are making a trade they often don't fully account for. The body keeps score. And whatever you're building, you experience it inside your body. That's the only place you experience anything.

What Stuck With Me

The quote Raleigh ends with is the one he keeps on his wall: "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek." He carries a small rock dragon to remind himself of it. The cave is dark. There are dragons. And that's exactly why the treasure is there.

It's a good quote. But what stuck with me more was the part earlier — about hoping the panic attack was a heart attack, because a panic attack meant you were too lame to handle adult life.

That's the part most people skip when they tell the tidy version of their story. The shame. The failed side hustles. The months of grasping at tax liens and real estate licenses before a MarketWatch article changed the trajectory.

Raleigh didn't find escape rooms because he was brilliant. He found them because he was desperate enough to be open. And then he was smart enough to see the demand, copy something that worked elsewhere, and ride a wave he didn't create.

He'll tell you that's not creative. He's wrong. It's exactly how most of the good ones do it.