Third Place Ventures | US based
We buy and keep community sports businesses.
Swim clubs, gyms, pools and small facilities under $1M EBITDA. Buy and hold. You choose how you exit.
Under $1M EBITDA
Buy and hold
Stay on and coach if you want
First call confidential
Community and sport
What we buy
Swim clubs & swim schools
Year-round teams, lesson programs, Masters groups, summer leagues.
Gyms & training facilities
Boxing, martial arts, strength, racquet, and multi-sport build-outs.
Community facilities
Courts, rinks, field houses, and membership-driven neighborhood clubs.
Public facility management
City-owned pools and rec centers operated under contract or pilot.
Adjacent local businesses
The shop, the diner, the studio that anchors the same block.
Non-profit conversions
Board-run programs that need an operator and a clean structure.
The process
From first call to keeping it open.
Conversation
A call with the owner. No broker theater, no premature LOI.
02Diligence
Books, contracts, SDE normalization, lease review, and a site visit.
03Structure
A written proposal built around the seller's actual constraints.
04Close & operate
Funding assembled for that deal, then we take over the back office.
The thesis
Founder-led community businesses are running out of runway, and the people who built them deserve a way to keep them open.
Succession, lease risk, and undercapitalization are killing off the neighborhood swim club, the boxing gym, the summer league, the rec-league field house. Operators want more compensation, better administration, real technology, and fewer board and landlord constraints. Owners want a dignified exit. In a niche this small, there are very few natural buyers.
Third Place Ventures is an asset-light acquisition and operating platform for exactly those assets. We are buying good small businesses in sport and community, one at a time, and running them with full time focus and care, with capital raised deal by deal so every investor sees the specific business they are backing.
Why it matters
Third places are the only rooms where a town actually meets itself.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg named them: third places are neither home nor work. They're neutral ground, they level rank, conversation is the main activity, and there are regulars. In America, most of what's left of that lives inside sport: the pool, the mat, the court, the dugout, the lobby with the vending machine.
When one closes, nothing replaces it. That's the asset class we're buying.
Read the full caseWhere to start
Third place
Not home, not work. The pool deck, the gym, the rink lobby, the field house. These are the places that make a neighborhood a neighborhood.
02What we do
We take on the admin, billing, hiring, and lease risk, fund the repairs, and let operators go back to doing the thing they are good at.
03Deal structures
Earn-ins, earn-outs, seller financing, staged buyouts, delayed SBA refi. Whatever actually fits the business and the family behind it.
04Who I am
Nils Bognar. Second oldest of five siblings, all swimmers. A lifelong part of sports and learning communities across the Southeast, and the person you'll be talking to.
If you own one of these places, or you want to own a piece of one, let's talk.
Sellers, coaches, operators, and investors all start the same way: a conversation about one specific business.
Contact Third Place Ventures