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Firecrown Buys AIM’s Marine Group Amid Sales Goal of $1B by 2030

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By: Christiana Sciaudone

Firecrown, a media platform focused on hobbies like flying, railroads and space, bought Active Interest Media's Marine Group, which includes B2B and consumer boating content. Terms of the deal were not provided.

It’s the latest acquisition by Firecrown, which has accumulated dozens of brands over the past three-plus years as it seeks to grow into a $1 billion company by 2030, with margins of 25% to 30%. Next year, the company should reach revenue of $80 million to $90 million. The newest titles add to the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company’s recreational marine business, which includes 21 titles. The publisher’s businesses also include financing, e-commerce and real estate.

Firecrown is led by Craig Fuller, the founder of TransCard, a fleet payment processor that was sold to US Bank, and owner of FreightWaves, a freight news and data agency. The acquisition includes consumer titles like Anglers Journal and Yachts International and Trawlerfest, which hosts boat shows. Fuller believes that it’s only with scale that media companies can achieve and maintain profitable growth.

“Having scale across a title group makes it a lot easier to innovate,” Fuller said. “When you have scale, you’re able to sort of go deeper into the top topics of concern. You’re able to mine those audiences for deeper data insights. You have a much bigger perspective of what an audience cares about.”

In 2025, “we’re going to remain opportunistic, but what we’re going to be investing a lot for next year is in the commerce side of our business,” Fuller told AMO. “Our model is content to commerce, and so we fundamentally have a large media presence. We also are focused on building out non-media revenue channels.”

That includes aircraft and boat financing and e-commerce sales of high-volume items like ropes and anchors. These combined businesses went from zero in 2022 to $10 million now and are expected to reach $100 million in 2027.

Meanwhile, Active Interest Media is taking the funds from the sale to help pay for a significant acquisition that will double the size of the company in 2021, when it hit $40 million in sales, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Clurman told AMO. Staff will increase by about 50%. The divestment of the Marine Group will allow AIM to focus on core categories like woodworking and home arts and increasing consumer revenue from areas like membership and subscriptions. That deal should close by early next year.

Firecrown gets about 70% of its revenue from print and intends on maintaining sales and content staff from AIM, and continuing with print. The company started the year with about 100 employees and will close it with approximately 240.

“I’m bullish on print,” Fuller said, in particular for enthusiast publications where the content is slow to change. Firecrown rolled out three new print publications this year in aviation and boating and hopes to push deeper into video. “Enthusiast media is a visual exercise.”