10 Hours of $100M Advice in Under 54 Minutes | S1 E0

I viewed myself as a guy already worth 100 million. I just hadn't arrived at that destination yet.

I'm like, how did life bring me here?

90% doing and 10% thinking you can win.

It's just a matter of will you win and will you do the work needed to win.

But how can we get 10% better?

I wish I spent a little bit more time just like, enjoying that, hit that milestone.

Yeah.

I think if I was going to distill down all of. If you want to call it personal growth in into one equation, it is desire plus non resistance equals desired result.

Welcome to capitalism.com this is a community of millionaires and aspiring millionaires who are building businesses and investing the profits. I'm joined by my counterpart, Alex King.

Hey, Ryan.

And we just wrapped the final episode of season one. We've been doing this for 10 years. We've been making content and helping entrepreneurs for 10 years. So it is time to enter into a new chapter in which we are creating a new group of millionaires who are building businesses and investing the profits. And we just wrapped season one, we just recorded with David Bayer, and we're going to recap and preview what you can expect in this first season of capitalism.com, this new format of the podcast. Because we interviewed entrepreneurs who are worth nine figures, entrepreneurs who have businesses that could sell for a billion dollars or more. And we also spoke with some of the members of our community who are at the beginning of their journey and just cracked a million dollars. And as a result of going through this season, you're going to see the mindset and the approach that we take of building businesses and investing the profits so that you are on track to have a net worth that trounces what was even possible in previous generations. That is my plan. That is the plan that we work with inside of our community. And I think that you will pick that up via osmosis as a result of listening to this podcast. So we start the season with David Osborne, who is a centimillionaire. He's worth well over a hundred million dollars. And we wanted to start with somebody who has made it to the top and is kind of looking back. He's. He's what, 60 years old, looks like? He's about 42. He's in great health. He has a great life. He's built a lot of wealth. He's got time. He's got his own choice of what projects he pursues. That's the life I want. I think that's the life that Most of us want. You made a ton of money and now you've got optionality over what you do. And I asked David, how did you make your first hundred million? And this was his answer during the podcast.

You know, I was always a guy that loved money. Like, I like to make money. I grew up with a rich uncle, a great uncle. We were poor, we were middle class, probably lower middle class. My dad lived on a soldier's salary, but my great uncle Ted had all the toys. He had the ranch, or in England, it was called a farm. And he let us stay in his gamekeeper's cottage. And he would have the Christmas dinners and he would sit at the head of the table, and then there'd be 40 or 50 family members at his house. And the kids were always at the junior table down the bottom. But I remember watching him make the speeches wearing his black tie because he was English and formal. And I always kind of related to like. I was intrigued by what that looked like. So from an early age, I think I made a decision to be financially free. Now, when you're little, that's not really a super conscious decision, but as I look back on it, I can see how that was formed.

So I would answer you. The number one way I made my money is by learning continuously. Anything I could learn that would lead me towards that goal of making my first hundred million. I viewed myself as a guy already worth a hundred million. I just hadn't arrived at that destination yet. So everything for me was, what would it be like to be worth a hundred million? And why not me? In fact, I used to have this analogy in my head of a fakaisha tree, a foucosha tree, fakasha tree. And what that is is a giant tree that when it grows at first it has too many branches to support it. So you have to support that tree in order for it to grow into itself. And then when it has the trunk that's strong enough, it looks massive. And I viewed that as myself. I was like, I'm already worth 100 million. I just don't have the structures in place to support myself in that. I say this, you have to know you're going to get there. And I always knew, but that doesn't mean I had masses of doubts. At times things go bad, I would doubt myself. I would have a weekend or a month where something had gone bad, where I would tear myself up inside about, you didn't do it right? All these doubts. But the bigger energy of David was always aware that I was going to be wealthy. I was going to arrive, and it was inevitable for me to end up where I ended up. But I want to go back to your analogy. So you said it's the reps in the gym, and that is correct. But if you want to be a boxer and you're going to the gym and exercising on endurance running, you might not be doing the right exercise. So, yes, it's reps for sure. It's knowing you're going to get there, and then it's figuring out exactly what's the workout that people do to become financially free. And I think a lot of people that I see, they do the workout for making more money. They get really good at making money, but they don't do well at keeping that money and investing that money and having that money grow. And so, yes, it's going to the gym and then being aware that you're going to keep changing up those reps to get the right formula of reps for the body that you want to have. And so for me, that would be a mixture of strength, endurance, and flexibility. So I've got to work in my yoga and I've got to work in my lifting of weights, and I got to work in the. The endurance exercises. So for wealth, it's learning how to make money, which is all about bringing value to the marketplace. And then it's learning how to keep that money and invest it wisely, because I think a lot of it, you said I lost a bunch of money, and I too, have lost a lot of money.

I love David's story. I saw him at the capitalism conference years ago, give a talk about building your $100 million flight plan was the name of the talk, and it was all about his mindset and clarity and vision behind building $100 million net worth. And one of the things that he talked about this time was the fact that he used leverage and he's a realtor and was a realtor.

And.

And so he realized that very early that he was never going to build $100 million net worth by selling houses. He had to figure out a different way to do that. And he figured out that the way to do that was to build people, to hire people, hire great people to run his franchises for Keller Williams. And so it was just really cool to hear his. His perspective on how he shifted from I'm going to trade these hours for these dollars to now I'm going to find people and build people and then trade that for dollars.

Yeah, I think both of us have discovered recently that you can get to a certain point of success on your own, but then in order to grow beyond that, you've got to take a different approach. And that usually means investing in people. You've been going through this in your own business?

Oh, yeah. I capped out at a certain number when I could no longer work on any more hours and I could no longer. I could increase my prices, but it's still not going to scale to the way that I would always love to scale to. And so I realized that I just need to find really great people. And realizing that, you know, Steve Jobs built Apple not in his garage by himself. Like he built it through a bunch of really talented people and held the standard high. And they also made a lot of money too.

I implemented this episode inside of capitalism.com, the company. And the way that I took this episode and applied it in my business was I changed the incentive structures for the full time employees of the team and I started reworking the incentives to get everyone focused on a few key numbers. And as a result of changing that, I have a lot more time and freedom in my own life. So that switch alone freed up like 20% of my mental capacity for other projects that give me higher leverage. So that's the first episode that we drop in. Season 1 of Capitalism.com Episode 2 is with Matt Clark. And Matt talks about how your business may not be the best investment. So contradictory to what most of us are taught as entrepreneurs. But here's a clip of him talking about how if he had invested his profits from his business in Amazon instead of his own company, he would have been much richer today. Here's the clip.

If I had taken, you know, call it like $8 million sort of cleared in the business that we probably could have done whatever we wanted with, taken that $8 million and then just put it in Amazon stock and done literally nothing for the next 10 years, today that would be worth something like 70 to 80 million dollars, which is much more than we ended up generating with that business. Probably actually destroyed most of that money.

So you did what everybody says you're supposed to do, which is reinvest into your business. Your business is your best asset. And what you actually discovered is that if you had done literally nothing and just put it into a well chosen stock, it would have multiplied by 10x or so. So that advice of invest in your business is interesting because it's, it, it sounds like the right advice most of the time, but when you run the numbers you invest in your business, you also have risk associated with that, I don't know how to justify. I don't know how to. How to reconcile that, because it seems like a paradox to me.

Yeah, not every business is created equal, which is obvious to say, but a lot of times we don't treat it that way. Like if you're Starbucks and you're, you know, say at your first 500 or a thousand stores, and you're like, man, if we just. Every new store we add. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I've heard these somewhere. It was like every new store they added, say it cost them like a quarter million bucks, like way back in the day. And then within two years, it's basically generating positive cash flow. So you invest a quarter million dollars, it makes its money back in two years, call it a 50% per year return, which is insane. And if you're like, okay, like, there's more cities that we can do this, it seems to be working out. You reinvest every dollar you possibly can. Or in their case, like, they can't literally generate enough cash flow to serve how much they can reinvest. So they raise debt, they raise equity. Dumping all the money into this thing that's just generating high returns on capital. Whereas most of us in smaller businesses, my business included at the time was like, we didn't have a great way to reinvest. We would sell as many of this freaking course as possible, but we didn't have a way to sort of pour more fuel on that fire. We needed to find sort of new fires to sort of go out there and light, which we were trying to do, but tried way too big. And so instead we could have maybe spent, you know, 50 grand creating a software tool. 50 grand, maybe on a different course, you know, some sort of service business, little tests here and there, not just saying like, hey, we've got 10 million bucks, let's see if we can spend it all on this thing. And it's going to turn this thing into more sales. Most of our businesses, I think, are like that. And so I think it's either like testing small, and if that stuff's not working out, if you don't have a good track record of using cash to create more cash, then you got to do something else with that money.

What I'm kind of hearing you say is that when you look at a business like Starbucks, they have a clear model that you could evaluate, like an investor. Yeah, but in a lot of small businesses, you have things that you're testing and those fires can build and build and light other things on fire. But they can also burn up a lot of money. And this is where entrepreneurs run into the trap of they make money appear out of thin air, but then, just like a good magician does, they make that money disappear back into thin air. And that cycle is something I thought I would be the exception to. I'll make my money and keep it. But I found out I'm a good magician. I make my money, and I can make it disappear, too. So I'm hearing you say that until there is a predictable model where you put this money in and you know that there's going to be a return or at least a thoughtful way to deploy that money, maybe it's not the best idea to roll your profits back into this loose idea of growth. Maybe it's a better idea to put that into better businesses that already have those economics figured out.

So Matt basically burned $8 million when it could have turned into 80 if he had just invested it in 2013, like he said. And what was cool about what Matt said was that we often think, oh, the best thing that I can do as an entrepreneur is just pour money back into the business over and over and over again. And so he was taking a bunch of swings. I'll do this project. I'll do this project. And then he found himself with $500,000 a month in overhead and. And just burning through money and going, I feel like I should be rich, but doesn't make any sense. And I think everybody can feel that way. And so his. His idea, the main switch that I got was you take your profit after you've maximized the amount of cash that your business can produce in that vehicle, you take that money and you put it into better vehicles. Better business.

Yes. Better businesses than you could build. Okay, great. You've been building your business for three years, and it's profitable. Do you think that that's a better investment than Google?

And it might be right. This is a judgment call for everybody. But I think most of us as entrepreneurs have experience where you've taken some profits and you put it into a project that didn't go so well when you could have put it into Meta or Netflix or Visa and done a lot better. So what's that balance? What's that plan? Well, Matt and I have both independently come to the same conclusions about how we're managing our own finances and investing for generational type of wealth, because we've lost a lot making dumb financial decisions. Dumb business decisions. You say Ponzi schemes?

Yes.

Up until recently my financial plan was basically make a bunch of money, invest it into Ponzi schemes.

Sounds pretty sound.

I lost a lot of money doing dumb things. Tai Lopez.

Oh, man.

I learned my lessons. They were expensive lessons. But now I have a plan. I, I have run all the numbers. I know that plan is going to compound into at least, at least a hundred million dollars. And Matt is basically following the exact same plan, so. Or at least a similar plan.

The way he talked about it, as somebody who's more along the starting journey of that, it made a lot of sense to me. And there was so many tactical parts of how he values companies, what he looks for, how these professional investors actually play the game that I found a lot of.

And another thing that came up with Matt is how a lot of the most successful investors in the world have very boring lives. They're not out there hustling and doing a product launch. Warren Buffett goes to McDonald's every morning. He drinks Coke every morning. Mohnish Pabrai does a lot of reading. Their life is not all that exciting. And yet here we are as entrepreneurs pounding the pavement and trying to grow every inch. And there has to be a balance or a trade off there. And I want to be old, rich and happy. And that's what we talk about building with Matt Clark. How do we approach our investment strategy so that we end up old, rich and happy? Now if you are just starting out and you don't have cash to put into investments, well, now we go into the business part of this season and we start with James Swanik. And James started a business that I was part of and it became a seven figure business. But he ended up being a million dollars in debt and he had to climb his way out and then started another business that reached eight figures and was super profitable within about two years. And here's a clip of him talking about that on the podcast.

Waking up one morning at 5:30 facing, you know, probably close to a million dollars of debt. It was a lot. And seriously considering going bankrupt. And what am I going to do? And I remember I Woke up about 5:30. I'm like, how did my life end up like this? I'm 45 years old, facing bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. And I'm living with my dad.

I'm like, how did life bring me here? I thought I had a multi million dollar business. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger used my products.

Yeah. And I remember scrambling, I was phoning people. You were one of the folks that we phoned and I really appreciated you giving us Some support and guidance, and you made yourself available to us, so thank you, Ryan And I phoned a lot of people. What was surprising is that a lot of the people I thought might give me time didn't. And people that I never in a million years thought would give me time actually reached out and said, hey, you want to ju on a call? So that was an interesting study of human beings and psychology and creating stories in my mind as to who were allies and maybe who weren't, and surprising allies shining through. But we just scraped. Like we just, you know that movie Any Given Sunday with Al Pacino, and he's doing that talk at the halftime in the final game, and he's saying, football is a game as a game of inches. On this team, we scrape and we grind and we crawl for that inch. That was what my brother and I.

Did to get out of that debt.

We literally looked at the books and we scraped and we crawled and we, like, reached and we cut a little bit of savings here and we cut some overhead here, and we made some sales here, and we phoned a few people here, and little by little, inch by inch, yard by yard, we made a lot of profit and we paid off the debt. And we did that over the next two and a half years. It was a grind, but we got out of it. And not only did we get out of it, we're now an incredibly profitable, beautiful business. I mean, it's not making millions and millions and tens of millions, and it's not buying us fancy houses, but it's a very good cash flow producing business.

You might be in a bad financial position, but you're probably not $1 million in debt unless you're Trump.

You know, I love the story of Trump being a billion dollars in debt. And he sees the homeless man, you know that story, he's like, you see that homeless man there? He has a billion dollars more than I do, and he's in a limo, right? He was that in debt. I like stories like that. And it makes you realize that money's not real. Like, it's just a concept. Okay, you're a million dollars in debt, or you're a billion dollars in debt. Guess what? That can change real quick. And oftentimes, if you've been trying for a long time, or you've been making a business, trying to make a business work for a long time, you can get discouraged about what those numbers mean. And that was happening with James. A million dollars in debt, he climbs his way out. But then guess what? As a result of the habits and the mindset he developed climbing out of that hole, he starts another business and it gets to eight figures within two years. That's what's so profound about that, is he's starting from the back of the line. But as a result of overcoming that, he has an eight figure business that's super profitable and now he can call his own shots.

Eight figure business. What about a nine figure business?

Oh, we talk about nine figure businesses, Alex. That's the next.

My favorite Mushroom man. We go to the Mushroom Man. Yes. The next episode is with Taro Isakopola, who is the founder of four Sigmatic. If that name sounds familiar, that is the mushroom coffee that is so popular. That's a nine figure business. But it started super humbly a little over 10 years ago and he first had to grind it to seven figures and now he's grown it to a nine figure figure business. But he's also starting another business with an even bigger vision and he's balancing two CEO jobs. And so I asked him how is he managing all of this? Here's a clip of him talking about it. You've got three kids, you've got a really successful business that you're the CEO of now you have another startup that you're hoping inspires a new direction for the planet. What mode are you in right now?

I was just telling the guy behind the camera that I'm just finishing an eight week weight loss period and a grind mode and I'm heading to a family vacation after next week and I'm gonna get fat and sassy. So right now I'm in like last week of grind mode, about to hit recovery, but active recovery. We're traveling with three kids, so it's not like I'm like sleeping.

12 hours a day. We're doing stuff, hopefully seeing the northern lights, but you know, like, yeah, I'm finishing a grind period.

And how do you go into recovery rest mode when you have a business that's launching? Yeah, you don't. You don't go into rest mode at the beginning of launch. So you must have had to plan and be thoughtful about this way ahead of time. Help me understand how you manage these three modes.

First of all, we were supposed to launch two months ago and I was supposed to go on vacation after that, but that didn't work out. The product is made in Canada and there was some customs and tariff stuff. So long story short, that was not planned. But yeah, it's four years of prep. Makes it easy that a lot of the stuff is done ahead of time and planned and it's just, it's ready to go. Secondly is that Hero has, you know, full time team management running it, you know, and.

At the end of the day, like you can't do it without the team. Like, and you're fortunate I'm in a. Fortunate enough to position to have a team on both companies. And if you're starting out yourself, that is not the case. And in that case that would not be possible.

So the fact that you have the support of the team overseeing operations, that's what is allowing you to go into rest mode in this instance.

Yeah. And in both cases there's actually a lot of reasons why more hours, me putting more hours to four sigmatic doesn't actually help four Sigmatic because the quality of four sigmatic, it heavily relies on the quality of the senior vice presidents and you know, those senior people and their level of people that they don't even want me. Like, they're micromanaging and doing stuff. So for my job is more like customer meetings, business development opportunities, things like that. And, and those are easier to juggle on and off versus there's work tasks, let's say ops or social media. Like you're always on, like you're always, you can't go on a take two weeks easy because people are messaging and tagging you on Instagram. You got to be on it. Or if you have to produce product, you have to produce product. And that's just not like the job description of a CEO at certain scale.

I felt that at certain scale the job changes. And where I'm. So where I sort of think I am is that that is beginning to evolve for me. And I'm playing this interesting war dance of letting go of the old and pursuing the new. But also that by its nature requires a different level of prioritizing creative time, prioritizing rest time because the daily grind of it is not as effective as it once was. It doesn't move the needle to the same percentage that that going out and making a key relationship does at this point in my career. So I have had this voice of tarot in the back of my head once in a while, say, are you in grind mode or are you in creative mode?

Can I give you another one?

Please do.

In the same realm, I like to look at it by this like four fields. But one is like what's the percentage of doing versus thinking? And when you're starting you're 90% doing and 10% thinking. And at some point you have to Consciously push yourself to spend more of your days just thinking and not doing. Because every decision you make has such an outsized impact. It's an Archimedes lever at that point when you have teams and resources and money and stuff. The other one is how internal or external you are. Are you working in the business or on the business and customer facing versus internally facing? And there's no one right answer but like navigating throughout the year in and out of those boxes. Because there is a point when no matter how big the company is, you gotta go and work in the business with the team on something hyper specific. And then there's a time when you go outside and sell and you don't talk to the team internally that much but you're just out and about in the world, right?

Yeah.

Taro is one of my favorite people in the world.

You work with him in some of your agencies?

Yeah, I've gotten the opportunity to work with him pretty closely for the last two years. Taro has three kids under four. He has one nine figure company. He's got another company that he's starting and it's emerging and it's going to be a powerhouse, maybe even bigger than four Sigmatic. And I love the fact that Taro, I've been around him so closely to know that he really does live a full life. Like he feels fulfilled. He spends time with his kids, he spends time with his wife, he travels. They do all kinds of things as a family. And I find it amazing that he's able to have a creative outlet. He's able to, he's very planned out, he's very Norwegian in the way that he thinks. He's like, he's from Finland, that's why I say that. And so it's just cool to see like what he's up to. And starting four sigmatic 12 years ago, 13 years ago, and now starting something again, going from the zero to one again, but this time raising money and hiring PhDs and doing really complex things with a bio company. It's totally different than, than selling mushroom supplements, you know.

So in this episode we talk about the grind to the first million, but we talk about getting to nine figures and we talk about starting a new concept. It's, it's a great foreshadowing of the entrepreneurial journey of getting to the first seven figures, growing to eight and nine, getting exposure, breaking out, establishing yourself and then pursuing a project that really excites you with an even bigger vision.

What a great first half of the season.

Yeah, I hope I can say that about the Guardians as well.

The Cleveland Indians.

Is that your Trump's a Guardians fan now? We're bringing back the Indians. We have a bit of a debate here@Capitalism.com about whose Trump oppression is better, Alan or myself.

I think it's Matt Doman.

You think Matt Doman is a better Trump impersonation than you?

Nope, I don't. But it's not mine.

Unless I say Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico. That's my one Trump.

One.

He's a broken record, friends. He only knows one word, but it's.

The greatest word you've ever heard.

The greatest word is tariffs. It's tariffs. It's the most beautiful word, Jane. So after tarot, we, we go right into another nine figure case study with one of my favorite living entrepreneurs, Derek Halpern. And Derek has a nine figure business that started in 2017 and he spent two years figuring out what the heck it was going to be. And now he has a business that he doesn't talk about the actual numbers, but what he did say was that in one month they shift about, they shipped about half a million units. Half a million units in a month. You can just run the numbers on what that means somewhere in the field of having a multi nine figure business.

It's a big business for sure. But Derek is one of the most interesting people that I've met through capitalism.com he spoke on stage at the capitalism conference in 2021. And Truvani was three years old, four years old at the time, and he was sharing about how they kind of grew. And so I was really excited to get an understanding of how it's happened since then. What is the 2025 version of 2021? Because four years ago he was talking about that he didn't believe in content marketing. He didn't believe in any of this stuff. He just ran Facebook ads to this page and boom, nine figure company. But now it's obviously much bigger business and they've done things very differently and so it's really cool. But my favorite part of that whole talk was when Derek was talking about winning. Because Derek's mindset around winning is something unlike I've, I think I've.

I usually come across whatever you go into, you win, you launch a podcast, you win, you, you launch a, a protein, you win. There's something in this mentality where you just seem to go for it. What drives that.

I actually did a video about this a long time ago, but when I was a kid, I have to credit my dad with this, because even though I grew up a little bit different than most people, and I say that because my mom was on, like, welfare for a lot of my, like, for early parts of my life, and dad was in jail my whole life and. But my dad taught me something very interesting when I was a kid. And he would get out of jail, we'd play chess.

And he never played chess for nothing. You have to play chess and you have to wager something. But I'm like, you know, I'm like nine, only money. So I can't bet him. So we'd wager push ups, and he would just demolish me one. I'm owing him. I'm owing him 100 push ups. And he would just sit there. He goes, if you're gonna bet it, you're gonna pay it. Now give me my money. And he would just watch me do push ups. And let me tell you, at that point, I really liked the idea of winning because losing sucked. And then, you know, he went away for a little bit, came back, and at that point, I went to the library and I read every chess book that I could find. And when he came back and I just tromped him, I just destroyed him because I was practicing. I actually found this one, Chess Hustle. I used to go to a comic store. This guy, angel, he was a chess hustler in Washington Square park. And he would go to this comic store, and he knew I liked chess. He goes, oh, man, you're nine, you like chess. And at that time, you know, this was early 90s, searching for Bobby Fischer was a really popular movie. So everyone liked the kid that liked chess, right? So he's like, oh, I'm a teach you chess. I got you. So he taught me to play chess. And I was reading the books, and he would always tell me not to follow the book, because chess hustlers play different than book book players. But I always liked the idea of the book because I feel like chess was proven. He came back. I beat him. I'm like, all right, I like winning. That's it. And it's.

It's.

It's because I didn't want to lose. And that kind of. That kind of created my desire to win and everything. And one of the things I will say is that because I've. I've been asked that question before, because I have succeeded a lot of different areas. And I think one of the things that sets me apart personally is I feel like I can win at everything, except probably basketball, because I'm know not tall enough to ever play a sport like that. But other than that, I feel like I could win in almost anything. And the reason why is because I don't view anything that you pursue as something that can't be done right. You can win. It's just a matter of will you win and will you do the work needed to win. And most people will go, they'll try something new, they'll fail and they'll give up. Whereas you ever see that graph where it's like, you know, most people think entrepreneurship is here and it's straight to the top, but in reality it's like all over the place and then you eventually get there. That was kind of my thought on everything is everything. You're no one's going to win without failure. It's just a question of how many times are you going to fail until you finally win. And most people don't get past the first failure.

The next group of people will get past that first failure and then make the same mistakes over and over again and wonder why they're not winning. With me, I knew that winning is eventual. It will happen if you put the work in. If you fail, you need to learn from failure. Most people don't learn from failure. Most people don't even want to talk about it. With me, I fail, I'll go read five books on the topic or hire someone or talk to someone else to try to figure out what I did wrong. And I think that's one of the things that set me apart is knowing that winning is eventual. If you're willing to believe that you're a winner. If you fail, what input are you going to put into the failure to figure out how to do better?

So that's our third nine figure entrepreneur and our second business case study. That's over nine figures here on the podcast. Then we go into more of the in the trenches up and coming how to do it entrepreneurs. So we selected two people from our community that built million dollar businesses in the last year to two years. And these are more case studies of starting over, getting off the ground and getting to the first million. And the first case study is with Alina who joined the capitalism.com community a year and a half ago. Did not have an idea, did not have funding, did not have a product and now she has a business, is pacing about 2 ish million dollars a year and it's super profitable and it's growing month over month. Here's a quick clip of Alina talking about her business and where it's at Right now, you release the first product, you have no idea what's going to happen. You got a month's worth of rent in the bank. What happens?

I was able to pay rent, so that's good.

The launch, I think it was like, it wasn't humongous right away. It was maybe like 5k that week.

5K? The first week ain't a bad week.

Yeah, yeah. A couple hundred sales. Then it. It was really interesting how quickly. Because, you know, you build that audience. You talk about this all the time, and it's so true. You build the audience, they start buying, you start emailing them and asking for reviews, et cetera. And then it really just snowballs. So by month four, I was pretty steady on like 50k per month.

Okay, so 1, 2, skip a few 50k a month. But month one, you launch, I think I remember you did just over $10,000 in sales the first month. Does that sound right to you?

Sounds right.

What was your mindset like at that point? Are you excited? Are you disappointed? Are you? What's going through your head when you do $10,000?

The first month, I was a little excited. Less than I would have wanted. Like, looking back, I wish I was more excited because that's such a. Like, it is such a good milestone. I think I've just felt more of, like, a sense of relief because I. That year was like a pretty stressful year for me, and so just that was like a milestone. Like, launching the product was the milestone. And then after that, I just could at least breathe for a little bit.

Yeah. You're not worried about this being a big failure and being pushed up against the wall at least as much?

I still was.

Okay.

But at least I love fair.

Yeah, you're an entrepreneur. Your back is against the wall for the first year.

But at least I, like, launched the product and that was like, okay, I did what I could, you know, and so getting that 10k felt good. It's not all profit, obviously. I think any entrepreneur, in the way that I was thinking back then was like, okay, well, what's next? Like, now I have to get reviews, 100 reviews, et cetera, et cetera. So I wish I spent a little bit more time just like, enjoying that, hit that milestone.

Yeah.

My favorite part about Alina is her stick to itiveness with the business that she does. She's almost robotic in the way that she pursues the growth of this business. And so in her previous life, she was a project manager, and so she treats everything in her business like a project Manager and, and it's been cool to watch her growth over the two years that she's been in the community. Year and a half, two years of having an idea, launching that idea, just continuing to build that thing up. And she has one product and she's doing almost $2 million a year.

Yeah.

This episode was honestly kind of a life moment for me. It really edified my work because we've been doing this 10 years teaching entrepreneurs how to build businesses, how to take them to a million dollars, have sold, I don't know, 400,000 copies of my book. We've been doing the podcast since 2013.

And only a few people actually do it and the few people who do it tend to become millionaires. And Alina just followed the plan and it made me a little emotional just seeing that journey and that trajectory. And she's so thankful for the work that we've done. That was just selfishly, that was a really, it was very edifying of my work and that made me feel really good.

Yeah, it was cool. One of her goals for the year was to be on the podcast.

Here she is.

Here she is on the podcast. So that was really, really awes.

Be a really good case study for those of you who are starting out, looking to begin the road to 1 million. Want to start a business, get it profitable and invest the profits so that you build a seven, eight or nine figure net worth over your career. That's a really good case study. And the second case study that comes after that is one of my business partners, Tomer. Now he runs one of the brands in our portfolio and that business is called Switch. And Switch has been a little pet project for a long time. But about six months ago it started to break out and now it's pacing $1 million and Tomer's on the road to 1 million. So Tomer and I sit down and we talk about how we're building this business to be a seven figure business over the next 12 months by just following the playbook. And the way that we're building this business is a little bit different. Different than how everybody else says you should. It's with a lot of one to one outreach. Here's a clip of he and I talking about that.

So the first question you asked me was what got us to 10k? And then we broke it down or what do we have as a brand? Like what are the assets that we have?

So what are we working with? What do we got?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So we had our email list, we had our very small following. We had our influence, a few influencer relationships, and we had some social proof.

And it's important, when you say influencer relationships, that doesn't necessarily mean people are posting about us. Means we have a relationship, means we can call them, we can reach out to them. And some of them had 10,000 followers or so, or they had replied to a message of ours. It doesn't mean that we're best friends. It means that, all right, we have a relationship here. Don't know what to do with them yet, but it's an asset that we have. And these customers, maybe they haven't heard from us in a while, but it's an asset that we have. We started just looking at what do we got, what do we have to work with? What do we have in the box that we can start to piece together?

Yes. And how can we leverage that to create more of these wins? Not 2x jumps, but how can we get 10% better? How can we keep doing the thing? And that thing was to go really deep and make every interaction meaningful. Not looking to create as many interactions as possible, but to make each one of them very, very meaningful. And so you treat your 15 subscribers or 15 customers that you have as an example, really, really, really well. Like the five that bought yesterday. You just go out of your way to thank them. And it's easy when you get five sales a day to say, how do I get it to 50? I need to 10x what I'm doing. But this is not the fastest way. Actually, it's not even the easiest way. The easier way, and the faster way would be, how can I compound the five sales and customers that I have and the two that said that they had really good experience with my product so that I can get five more? And once you start building that system, then it very quickly compounds because those five customers now become three of them, become raving fans who tell two of their friends, and one of them left an Amazon review. And it's again, it's easy to say, I only have 13Amazon reviews, I need 100. But I only got one sale a day, so what do I do? But if you take each of those reviews and you post it on Instagram and you send it to your list, and then you get three more sales and you follow up with these customers and you get more reviews, before you know it, you're at 100 reviews. And before you know it, these hundred reviews really scale up your sales. So it's not about counting the money more than it is, how do I count those Micro wins. Like now I got three likes on that post. Cool, let's DM these people and thank them for liking my post and start a conversation. Not because it's scalable. It's not scalable, but.

You should do the unscalable things at first so that you can scale faster later.

This was the most tactical episode in the in the season by far. I think maybe Matt Clark around investing was good, but this is really if you were an e commerce entrepreneur trying to build a business to a million dollars. This is like the episode for you, Tomer. And what you guys talk about is that it was at $9,000 a month, a year ago.

Yes.

And then it grown.

It has grown to pacing a million dollars.

Pacing a million dollars, which is an incredible growth in that time. And like this is just breaking down exactly what you guys are doing, which is really cool.

And we saved this episode to close to the end of the season because a lot of people are shitting on new starts, especially in E commerce right now. And this is a case study that shows if you do a few things well, you can still build a multimillion dollar business. The playbook that we are following with that brand is not like the traditional playbook of starting a business. It is a lot of just pounding the pavement and doing very simple things for about two hours a day. And as a result, it is compounding month over month over month. And this approach has changed the way that I teach and train and coach a lot of our entrepreneurs@capitalism.com because we've proven that you can just do simple free things and build it to a million dollar business and beyond. And it has shifted the approach because now it's even simpler and even more cost effective to build a profitable business. Because we've proven this model on this brand. You know, I wrote a book called 12 Months to 1 Million.

You did?

I did. And this business has taken a lot longer than 12 months to reach a million dollars. And we only broke out when we started following this different playbook. And it is now becoming the foundation for how we build all of our businesses. We now layer this in as a starting point for all of our businesses and we're teaching this to our students@capitalism.com because it's free, it's provable, and anybody can do it. So it has changed the way that I approach building businesses and we detail all of what that looks like in this episode with Tomer.

I'm really excited for the sequel 48 months to a million.

Oh burn.

Or 12 months to 250,000.

So yeah, it took us longer on, on this business to reach a million dollars, but we cracked it. We finally figured that one out. Now we have talked to centimillionaires, that's entrepreneurs who are worth $100 million. We've talked to people who are building or have built nine figure businesses. We talk with an entrepreneur, Matt Club.

That would be a deca Centimillionaire.

Nailed it. And then we talk.

So we start this season talking with a centimillionaire. That's somebody worth over a hundred million dollars if you didn't know that. And we talk with centimillionaire entrepreneurs who have nine figure businesses. We talk with Matt Clark who has built an eight figure business and has invested the profits. And we both are following the same approach to building businesses and investing in profits. We then go into case studies of people who are building from the ground up. So up until this point, we cover getting started all the way to living $100 million life. We end this season talking about mindset. And I have always thought that you, you really can't change a person and get them on the road to 1 million until you change their mindset. And even if you could, what would be the point? And we end the season with David Baer. I wanted David on the show because he sums up all of personal development in about 90 seconds. And here's a clip of him talking about how he sums up personal development in a couple paragraphs.

I, I think if I was going to distill down all of, if you want to call it personal growth into one equation, it is desire plus non resistance equals desired result. To me it's so beautiful because that, that's, that's the master key for playing the game. But what we were taught was desire plus hustle and grind equals desire result or desire plus have enough time or money equals desired results. So if you don't have time or it doesn't seem like you have time or money, then you can't produce the desired result. But the beautiful thing is that the time, the money, the strategies will come and are the natural byproduct of non resistance. And so that flips the whole game on its head. Now you're like, okay, I know what I want. Let me look at my resistance to what I want and let me acquire some tools to actually transform that resistance. And the tool that we're talking about is the decision.

I've gotten to know David over the last, it's been like seven or eight years. He's One of those people that I've met only a few times. But we feel close because the more we know each other, the more we like each other. I feel this kinship with David in the way that both of us have gone deep into the personal development space and synthesized a lot of information. David just has a beautiful way of summarizing ancient teachings with modern understandings and then saying it in a way that is applicable in about two to five sentences. And so I don't want to go down a deep rabbit hole of personal development, but I want to end this season talking with David because stuff is going to come up on your entrepreneurial journey. David's approach is very helpful to dealing with what comes up along that path.

Now, Ryan, there's. There's one other episode that we haven't decided how to use yet.

There is? Yes. I. I don't know if we're going to release this one or not.

April 11th is today, and if you're listening to that episode on June 22, then you know what we decided.

You will know what we decided about this secret bonus episode. We flew to Scottsdale and we recorded an interview with Michael Bernoff and it was a great experience in person.

Yeah, you should mention that. It was with 30 people live.

Yeah, there's 30 people there in the audience. It's at Michael's office. It was phenomenal in person, on camera. It just comes across a little awkward. It was wonderful to be there in person. I'm not sure that it will be as impactful on camera. So we don't know what we're going to do with that one yet.

Subscribe to our Patreon if you'd like that.

There's no Patreon.

You can spend thousand dollars.

Subscribe on YouTube and with one click, you might see it. Just hit the subscribe button.

No, no, no. I'm selling it for $1,000.

Even Michael says in that episode he's like, working with me is very expensive. You should ask a question because working with him directly is tens of thousands of dollars. And so he very quickly gets to the core of things and can change understandings and behavior. And he did that for the audience. It's just hard to tell that story on camera. So we're not sure what we're going to do about that. It might be an audio only, so make sure you're subscribed to the audio feedback of the capitalism.com podcast. We're not sure what we're going to do with the video Breaking the fourth wall. Ryan, I've Said much more uncomfortable things on camera.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I'm really excited for season 2 first episode being Grant Cardone.

How to 10x your apartment building.

It will not be Grant.

Come on, man.

Grant Cardone will not be on the show. He will. He is not invited to my next 10x your vision. I I oh, this is making me uncomfortable just thinking about it.

You need to 10x that mindset.

For those of you who don't know, Grant and I did some content together and it didn't go very well.

And look what happened. You negative 10x your wealth.

You.

No, but season two is gonna be so sick. It doesn't have Grant Cardone. No, I mean, I don't know. I don't know you, Grant.

I'm sorry, but my hope for this season is that everyone who has been following capitalism.com for the last 10 years will feel like they got a refresh on what it looks like to build an 8 and 9 figure net worth. And also that everyone who is yet to discover our work@capitalism.com feels like they got the vision set for building that type of an impact.

I used to think that a nine figure net worth was hard, was.

Impossible. I needed to figure out the how and now I feel like it's inevitable. And I hope that people feel the same way after hearing this season whether they are starting out from scratch. We have case studies of people who are starting over and built seven figure businesses. If you're in the middle of your journey, we're featuring people who have nine figure businesses and are investing the profits. And especially right now when the world feels a little bit uncertain, I think the best thing that you can do is plant the seed of starting a business and investing the profit and be ready to do that for a long time and success is inevitable.

Beautifully said.

So here's what you can do right now. You can subscribe to the channel, you can subscribe to the podcast feed, and you can be ready for season one, which will drop here in the next couple of days. And I want you to know that we are building a community of entrepreneurs and and investors who are building seven figure businesses and investing the profits. And we hope that you will be along for the entire journey. For those of you who have followed my personal brand for a long time, this is the show that will be branding as a company and as a community. So thank you to those of you who have followed my personal journey. Now we begin the story of capitalism.com and the community of millionaires that we build here. Alex?

Yep.

You ready for the ride?

I am.

Let's go. Thanks, everybody. Subscribe to the channel. We'll see you soon.