From Massive Losses to Million-Dollar Wins: Shakil Prasla's Journey of Entrepreneurship

You bought it for 200 and change and you sold it for 10 million. I can see why this is your favorite.

Yeah. Yeah.

So you took all the money that you could scrape together, plus personal loans, and you're like, this is a bet I'm going to make.

Yeah.

And you put it all into gloves.

This supposed to net me like two, $3 million.

But it didn't go that way.

We lost over $6 million.

You've had all these successful businesses, and now one has pretty much undone all of that success.

Yeah. I was not focused on my kids, my family, my health. I kept questioning myself, like, why did I do that though? Why was I so greedy?

So you drove in on with this Lamborghini. We knew you were here because your Lamborghini made loud noises coming down the driveway. How many of those do you have?

One of those.

Okay. But you got some other ones too.

I do.

What are they?

Range Rover, Tesla, Model X, Porsche, and then a Rolls Royce Cullinan.

Beautiful. So first I want to ask, how did you make your money?

Well, I mean, growing up, I was very poor. Parents migrated to America in the 80s. So to me, growing up, I was poor. I saw it and felt it. Not so much as I would if, you know, if I was poor today, but just I knew that things were hard to get. And so I, like, after I graduated college, I told myself, I never want to be poor. And so at that time I was like, I just got to get the highest education I can. So I got an MBA and then went on the Internet and typed in what should an MBA graduate work at? Like, should I be an investment banker? Should I be an analyst? And I came across a blog that talked about working online and working from home in your PJs. And I was like, ah, that's the job I gotta have. This was in 2012. I didn't know how much it was gonna make, but that's how I got started. It was just, just an E Commerce. From E Commerce, I acquired a bunch of companies, then transitioned to a wholesale model and now transition to real estate.

So, Shaquille, your. Your primary objective has been acquiring cash producing assets? Essentially, yeah. How many businesses have you acquired in your career?

Oh, probably over 30.

Did you acquire the convenience stores too?

Yeah.

Okay. How many of those family has.

My dad started it.

Okay.

In the 80s, and then he got it at a certain point and then I've been growing it since. So he. He really focused on older stores, existing stores, and taking over the leases. And I'm doing more of the finding the land, doing the construction, doing the architecture, the engineering, all the entitlement, getting financing, getting the franchises in Pizza Huts, Burger Kings and then getting into operational where my brother in law then takes it over.

You've acquired over 30 businesses. You have a portfolio of gas stations and convenience stores. You're in real estate. You have to be the busiest passive income guy that I've ever met in my entire life. How do you manage all of these different operations?

It's funny, I wouldn't even say I'm, I'm busy. I think what I've been good at is really being good at automation and really focusing on like the top 20% of growth. Everything else I'm really good at just ignoring or like canceling out that noise. And so last year I was really busy. I was, I was at one point taking up to 30 calls a week. This year I've changed my schedule where Tuesdays and Thursdays. So today are the days I do meetings, I do calls, and then Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I keep it completely open just to look for opportunities, just to relax with the family, just to recharge. So no, I'm not busy. I do have a VA that handles my emails.

You've bought 30 businesses, you've had some exits. What's the secret? I have a V.A.

Yeah, yeah. She's based in the Philippines, so not even based in the U.S. yes, I am cheap about that too.

So I just love, like there is this dichotomy with you that I've always found fascinating because we've known each other for over a decade and I remember when you first reached out and said you listened to the show and you had a couple E Commerce stores and you've scaled up with all these acquisitions and these big exits and this giant portfolio and you've always had simple answers to what I thought were really complicated questions. So I just asked you, how do you manage this portfolio of all of these businesses? And your answer is I work two days a week and I have a va. There's got to be more to this or I'm doing something very wrong with my life.

Yeah, yeah. So, so let me unpackage that a little bit. So let's start off with the freshest thing I'm doing, which is real estate that's different from E Commerce because it's taking a same business model and just repeating it. So over the last five or seven years I've built, I would say a nice team of contractors that work, you know, for this model, for example. So it took trial and error. That's why I said last year and the years before, I did work a lot. But now I'm at a point where all I have to do is tell people, hey, real estate agent, I'm ready to buy the next land. Go look for it. They'll go look for it. For me, I use CREXI to do a lot of my analysis for real estate, which tells me this is the going price in the area. Here's some comps that sold in the area too, which helps for me for my appraisal when I get financing too. And then from there, I use the same strip center model, which is a gas station and then a strip center. Right. And so it's the same floor plan. I'm just copying and pasting. And so to get to this point, yeah, I had to do a lot of work, a lot of trial and error. But at this point, I'm just scaling, just using the exact same model. And going forward, is it fair to.

Say that your approach to business is that you experiment until there is a model that works, and then you look to repeat that model as many times as is financially responsible?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Was it that. Was it the case with. When you were fully in E Commerce as well, you were looking at a model that works and looking to deploy that across multiple businesses?

Yeah, it was in E Commerce. My model was personalized to me where, yeah, anybody could go buy online business, but I bought businesses where I thought I could provide value. And, you know, most people may want to buy a business that's making $100,000 and try to scale it up as much as they can. For me, it was about two things. Making my money back as quickly as possible. And then two is how do I increase my hourly rate. So if I buy a business that's making a hundred thousand dollars a year and I spend, let's just call it a hundred hours a year on it, I'm making $1,000 an hour. So I was always looking to see how I could increase my hourly rate. Those were kind of two metrics I was looking at, which is probably a little different from other people in general, but that's all I was doing. And. And the only way I could increase my hourly rate is I take a business, I look at it and see what can I do to make some quick adjustments. Can I cut cost or can I grow it? Right. And so with cutting costs, I would look at the financials to see, hey, these guys have overpaid Americans. Can I outsource that? Hey, they're using call it Braintree as their credit card processor. Can I convert that and save some money? Right. It's not. I'm not doing anything extraordinary there. I'm just looking at opportunities to save money that I've already done before and then two for growth. A lot of agents, I use a lot of agencies. Right. So someone's got a Facebook ad, someone's got an email marketing. Is this being underutilized and can I capitalize on it?

So it sounds like you kind of have this suite of tools and people and you're looking to deploy that into different asset classes. In real estate, you have your team of people who are finding you deals and building the strips. In E Commerce, you have your team of Facebook advertisers or email marketers, and you're deploying them into different businesses. Is that a fair summary?

Yeah, exactly.

So most people. When I say most people, I mean me and people like me, would look at a business and say, this is doing 100,000. We could be doing a million. And then we would try all of these things to try and make it go from 100,000 to a million. You instead are looking at this and saying, this is making 100,000. Let's pretend it doesn't grow. Let's reduce expenses, and let's bring in some people that I know do good work, and then I will stay out of the way. And if it grows and services the debt, awesome. But I'm not going to stress about it too much.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Exactly. If it's 100,000 a year and you know someone like Ryan wants to do a million dollars, well, I'll go buy 10 of those. Is kind of my mindset there too. And it's not as easy as it sounds, but you could really just replicate that to get it there. I mean, that's what I did with E Commerce at a certain point.

Could you give us a story of a business that you acquired and that you ran that model on, either one that you've sold or that you currently still have in the portfolio?

Yeah, my favorite one is. Was a. I have to have a favorite one. Just like Ryan. You have a favorite child. I'm kidding. Is with custom challenge coins.

Custom challenge coins?

Yeah. What is that? Yeah, it's like, what the hell is that? Do you challenge somebody with that?

I. I know that sounds like a niche market.

It's so crazy how I stumbled upon it. So I. It was a broke through a brokerage called Quite Light, and it was a guy out of Chicago that was selling lapel pins. And so, you know, lapel pins you're seeing on suits and stuff. And I bought it, I remember, I think, for a 2x multiple.

And do you remember what you paid for it?

Yeah, it was 220,000.

Okay. It's a small business. Yeah.

But I just sold that last year for quite more than that.

Well, how much did you sell it for?

Eight figures.

Over $10 million. Yeah. You bought it for 200 and change, and you sold it for 10 million. I can see why this is your favorite.

Yeah, yeah. Yes. That was one of the better success.

Okay. I obviously want to hear more, because you just said, Shaquille Prasla, that your playbook is if something's making 100 grand, which is about what this is making, that you're gonna try and reduce expenses and free up efficiencies and then stay out of the way.

Yeah.

And then you cut to. Well, and then it grew to being worth over $10 million.

And I'll tell you.

So some stuff seemed to happen in between there, Shaquille. Yeah.

It took 10 years to get there.

Okay.

So we bought it in 15, and I partnered with one of my classmates from MBA program. And the deal was that I provide most of the capital, but you do most of the work. And he was okay with that. And so that's how we got started in 2015, 2016. I think we still made $100,000 in 2017. My partner said, hey, we need to go to China. Like, the business isn't really growing. Let's see if we can negotiate a better pricing. And I was like, I just do it over email. He's like, no, Shaquille, you're meeting in person. You have to go negotiate with them in person. And that makes a difference. I said, okay, I'll come with you. I get to go to China. So we went to China, and we met with our key vendors. We negotiated better pricing, but instead, what we saw was other products they were manufacturing. Remember, we were only making lapel pins, but this factory makes all kinds of metal products, metal promotional products. And so challenge coins, marathon metals, badges for, like, policemen. They were making all these products. And we were like, man, let's produce this products, too. So we. We came back to the USA and we launched different product lines that we just saw in China. And, you know, up till that point, William. I mean, Ryan, I was. I wasn't active in the business, so it's not like I could have said, hey, you know, let's launch these products. You know, I had relied on my partner and he was doing a good job. But when we came across these products, I said, let's launch them. They're way bigger business than lapel pins by itself. And so challenge coins is a sort of this commemorative coin that's given to the military. And the word challenge comes from, it's sort of like a truth and dare. When you're with your pals, army guys, at beer or at a bar, you challenge somebody and say, hey, I challenge you to go talk to that girl. And if you have your coin with you, then they cannot challenge you. But if you have that coin, you get to challenge somebody. So that's where challenge coins came from. And it's a huge, huge market. And we became one of the largest challenge coin sellers in the USA from 2017 to last year.

Would you call that a happy accident or would you call that strategy? I mean, you found an opportunity based on what was in the sphere of influence for this business. But you don't just randomly start selling millions of dollars worth of challenge coins. There had to be a strategy behind that as well. You understand what I'm asking?

Yeah, I do. I think if we didn't go to China, I don't know if he would have grown, know, sort of this horizontal way. I, I, I think we would have grown another direction, maybe double down our SEO or, or Facebook ads, for example. So it was accidental and, and sort of realizing challenge coins because when we saw the production lines, most of them were challenge coins, not even lapel pins. And so I was like, hm, why aren't we selling that? Right. So it was accidental in finding that. But I, it was strategy in terms of growth. And growth was just launch the product, do a lot of content, do a lot of SEO. We already had emails for customers. We started targeting them. But your lapel pin buyers were not your challenge coin buyers either. Right. So that strategy didn't work. So we went back to let's do SEO and just target driven ads.

And that strategy of SEO and the advertising channels, was that kind of in your playbook of how, you know to grow businesses?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's kind of part of the system that you've learned over time. Kind of like, I know how to sell things on Amazon and I know how to monetize email lists. So that would be part of my playbook to plug into any business. If I saw that they had an under monetized email list or they were taking a ton of sales on Shopify and I would bring them over to Amazon, I know that business would Grow? Is that kind of what you're saying? You have this skill set that you know that you can grow as long as you stick to the plan.

Absolutely. But sort of to counter that, this was my skillset. Amazon's your skill set. A lot of people do try to become an expert in everything, and I think that's where people really struggle. Like I struggle with Amazon. I mean, I'm not good at Amazon at all. I dabbled into it. But luckily, like, I, if I know I'm not good at it, I'll hire an expert. And if that product, that expertise still doesn't work, I'll just drive, drop it and move on. So I do move on very quickly. I want to fail Chip cheaply and quickly and then move on.

It sounds like a big part of your approach is ensuring that you have people that you can rely on. So could you give a little bit of an overview of how you find good people?

Ryan, I don't think you're gonna like this answer though, man. It's, I wanna, yeah, I want people to listen and say, oh my God, that's so smart. But it's, it's, I, I, there's nothing extraordinary. I do, I don't run personality tasks or disc tests or anything like that. I, I'll go to LinkedIn or I'll monster or whatever when, when I was actively recruiting myself and just post a job listing and then I'll just go through resumes or I'll first tell them, hey, fill out like a 5 questionnaire. Like, hey, what would you do if you were the CEO of this company? How would you grow it? And that forces them, number one, to go research my company. And number two is everybody that kind of just mass applied, it filters them out. Right. So kind of had that gating thing there. But, but then two is the people that applied and looked good on your resume and did a good job with your questionnaire. I'll just get on the phone with them and I'll just talk to them, really say, hey, thank you for filling it out. I'm looking to hire a CEO. I want somebody to be hands on. What are you good at? Like, what do you see yourself in five years from now? Where do you see the company from five years from now? How can we structure your comp to where you would be incentivized to stay for the next five years? Some people need the job security, so, so they want to be comfortable that, hey, Shaquille, you're going to keep this company around for five years or some People really want the upside as well too, so it's understanding that. But you know what the hard part is though? A one hour conversation is not going to tell you how that person's just going to perform. I've had bad hires too. Somebody sounded like an all star. They ended up just selling themselves to me. They didn't perform at all. It's hard, but it's just a trial and error. Sorry it didn't work out. I'm on to the next person.

Yeah. So I'm asking this selfishly because I have a portfolio of businesses that are all performing reasonably well. And I'm in this period right now where I'm realizing I need CEOs in each one of these departments. I've tried it, you know, management by jury and it's, it's each, each brand needs its own leader. And it sounds like you did that from the start with everything you said. I don't want to be bothered on a day to day basis. I can't have a portfolio of 30 businesses. If I'm bothered with all of these different businesses, I need somebody who is in charge of operating them. And one at a time, you installed people to run them. Am I understanding you correctly?

Yeah, yeah. You, you are you. As a owner of a business, you have to understand your drawbacks or your limitations. For me, I.

One of mine is that I see the best in everybody and I want to hire them all.

So I mean, on that point, you could maybe work with the AHR company or, or a staffing agency to like do all that filtering for you. That's one way to vet people out. My drawback is I don't like operations. I get bored of it. And so I don't want to operate the companies. What I'm good at is empowering you. I'm not going to be looking behind your shoulder and saying, hey, don't click on this or don't do that. Right? And so you have to understand yourself and then whatever your limitations are higher for somebody. For that.

When you ask the question, what are you good at? Are you looking for how this person's skill set is going to grow this business so that you can get out of the way? Or are you looking for somebody who can implement your playbook of SEO and content and ads and apply it into the business that you own?

I would give them guardrails. So to your point about the strategy, it is up to them on how they want to move around in those guardrails. Right? You can implement eos. You could have metrics tied to their incentives. You know, for, for me it's, it is getting out their way and you know, it depends on the business. I'm usually looking for somebody that's more marketing, marketing driven. But if it's a big business, you need somebody that's a leader as well too. And so it kind of depends on the business, but most of the time I'm looking for somebody that has sort of some kind of marketing background.

So you sold this coins challenge coins business last year for eight figures.

Yeah.

I know you also sold some other businesses last year, I think just to free up your focus because you had 30,000 businesses.

Yeah, yeah.

Would you tell me about one of the other ones that you've exited recently?

Let me try to top this. This was more of a uncomfortable sale. So. So in the E Commerce at one point I had 12 or 13 e commerce brands. Now I have two. So I sold 11. It started in 2021 where multiples were spiking and I thought, hey, now is a good time to sell but also free up my time. So between 21 and 24 I sold 11 businesses. Most of them made my money back. Some I just ended up losing money.

So you have had ones where you acquired businesses and you ended up taking a loss or breaking even.

Mm.

Did you make cash along the way in those?

Yeah, I did, I did. But. But still it, it like this one, I'll give an example was it ended up being a buyout, so I ended up getting bought out. It's. It started off as a friendly conversation, but it ended up being worse than, than it, than it needed to be, you know, with the lawsuit that ended up happening. Yeah. So there's a lot of learning.

Finally there's some like thorn on the rose because your life just sounds rosy. I buy businesses, I install managers, I work twice a day and drive a Lamborghini.

It's, I mean, you know, there's battle scars all over me that has gotten me, I mean I'm very blessed, very blessed to be able to be here today from the first time I was on your podcast 10 years ago. Right. Yeah. But with, with this, we bought in 2018. This was my first seven figure EBITDA acquisition. So I was making over a million dollars a year. Wonderful business. It was a drop ship business and the opportunity there was let's store the products so we could gain more margins on the business. Right. Since they're making 20% gross, let's bump it up to 30% by storing in it even after warehousing fees and labor fees. Right. So you get that incremental bump in there. And it was going well. Again, I'm not sure. And I'm upfront with my partners, too. I am not going to be putting in a bunch of time into this. I am not good at operations. I can help guide the way we could. I could be a soundboard. Let's work through some ideas. But I'm upfront about that. So my partners in this deal were fine. In, what was it, 23, it was decided that let's go sell the business. I said, all right, let's do it. I know who to go to. A week later, two of the partners said no. And they're both brothers. They're like, no, let's. Let's buy the other two people out. And so I said, okay, let's come up with the valuation. And so there's so many different ways you could go list a business and ask a broker for valuation. We did that. They went with a broker that will give them a low valuation. We went with a broker that would give a higher valuation. That didn't work out. We told them to make an offer. They give us low offer. We. We asked for a higher offer. It took six months of negotiations to buy us or to come to that number. That was still fine. The terms of the deal were where it got a little icky, was we got all the money up front, but we ended up staying a guarantor to the existing loan of the company until they were able to get us out. You know, and our understanding was within three months, their understanding was not that. Right. And so that. That's where issues happen. And it's hard to foresee these things. Ryan, as entrepreneurs, you ended up. You end up actually being on the top of all these decisions. So many families rely on you for all these decisions. It is a lot of pressure. And so this was unexpected. This was not needed. We were friends, and it just did not end up that way.

I've got a few of those.

Yeah.

So I want to summarize what I'm hearing as Shaquille's playbook to multimillion dollar portfolios.

Let's hear it.

So I'm hearing we buy profitable assets, we install a CEO, we look for efficiencies and opportunities to increase profit. And then you have a growth plan, and you let the person who's in charge execute the growth plan. And that's Shaquille's playbook, as I'm hearing it. And the results of that are sometimes you have base hits where you make some profit along the way and then you sell the business. Sometimes that doesn't work out how you hope it does, and sometimes you hit a grand slam. Would that be a fair overview of your approach to business?

Yeah, yeah.

So in that, in that way, it's not necessarily about the performance of one business, it's about the performance of the portfolio in totality. Is that right?

Absolutely.

There's something really interesting about that to me because I put so much pressure on myself for, for each individual thing to grow. And if something isn't growing, it's often getting all of my attention. Cause I wanna make it grow. And my guess is that your approach is more just cut the losers, cut your losses and grow the overall portfolio. This is a long term game for personal net worth. This isn't about making each individual brand successful. Is that right? Is that how you approach it?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean it's, I wouldn't even say I'm like a chill guy with these things. I mean, you don't want to lose money. You don't. It sucks to look at a business that you bought and it's not performing, you know. Yes, I want to go fix it too, but I sort of give myself, here's 40 hours. Where do I want to spend it? Right. And where's my highest roi? Is it this hourly rate where you know, for every like $100 the business makes, I'll end up making $500, you know, from selling it or this loser that is declining, where do I want to spend my time? And so yes, it sucks, but I'm, it's easier for me to say, here's a stepchild, I don't want to work on that right now. I'm going to go work on these other businesses.

So you're looking at maximizing the ones that win and just minimize the losses on the ones that are taking up energy.

I do, yeah.

Tell me about a business that you acquired that you either took a loss on or that it just, it didn't perform the way that you expected it to.

Yeah, I have a big loss that ended up happening during COVID which was a gloves company. And so during COVID I mean everybody's locked down. I think like February 2020, when things started getting locked down, everybody saw a decline in E Commerce. And that's when I was still heavily into E Commerce too. And so it was like, what do we do? I can't even go to my like warehouse and like check on my employees. Can they even go there and stuff? I think I forget if there was some kind of limit of 5 people or 10 people at that time at certain, you know, get together. But at that point I was like, man, what do we, what do we do? And so I remember our customer service team asking that, hey, we're getting a lot of inquiries for like ppe. Do you guys have any sources for that? And so at that time, masks were a popular thing. And so I went down a rabbit hole of asking everybody in E Commerce if they have any vendors. And so dabbled a little bit into that, selling it to our E commerce customers. And then it transitioned into gloves. And this is when greed really took over me. I did not even see this coming, nor did that was I even expecting this out of myself. But like a. At that point, your normal sort of box of gloves that you see at a doctor's office, your nitrol gloves, before COVID it would sell for like $2 a box. And it was during COVID the height of it, it was selling for $20 a box, right? But to buy it overseas, you know, before it would cost like a $50. During COVID is costing $15, right? So you buy it for $15. So it's inflated 10 times, you know, the cogs because of supply and demand. High supply, low demand. I'm sorry, the opposite. High demand, low supply. And we were making some good money off that. So it was a five dollar delta per box. If you bring in, you know, like, was it 3,000 boxes on a container or something?

You're doing like looking at mass orders for something that's very inflated because of the situation of the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's what was happening. Like, greed just took over for me completely. So like, each container we're making like 50 grand in profit, right? So in my head I'm like, okay, well if I bring in 10, that's half a million dollars I could make in like a few weeks. Man, I don't know who would say no to that. But that's. That's the only thing that went through my mind is I want to. I want to start making even more money. And so I just went all in. Like, I got as much money as I could get from all my businesses, just took them out. I took personal loans. I think I bought like 10, $10 million worth of inventory with my other partner that you know as well. And it was.

You took all the money that you could scrape together, plus personal loans, and you're like, this is a bet I'm going to make. Yeah, and you put it all into gloves.

All into gloves. It's supposed to net me, like, two, three million dollars. And that was supposed to be recycled every month, Something like that.

Yeah, but it didn't go that way.

It didn't go that way. It was at the worst timing, you know, if it was six months ago, sure. But December 2020, I think that's when the vaccines came out. Supply was catching up to demand, so your prices started going down. Right. And so I remember in January, I was like, oh, my God, if I sell that today's prices, I'm gonna lose a million dollars. No, no, guys, let's look for somebody else. I had, like, friends, family, like contractors, just looking for people to sell through. Now the people that we had as a customer list weren't buying anymore.

And so the maximum fear in the marketplace was gone. Right, and there were plenty of other gloves in the marketplace at this point.

Yeah, exactly. This was around the same time me and my team bought gloves.com.

I remember sitting in a bar with you as you were closing the deal for gloves.com, and I'm like, this is the coolest person in the world. He's just going all in on this thing, and he's making a strategic bet here.

Yeah, Yeah. I wish that story ended up being better. Right? Yeah. We paid $1.2 million just for that name itself. And, yeah, I mean, I went all in because I believed in it, but I didn't believe in the product or anything. I believed in the situation. I mean, I took advantage of that situation where, you know, if I look back at today, you know, my. Ethically, I wouldn't want to do that again. Just taking advantage of a sort of this pandemic. I would not do that again. But then two was greed. I mean, I. I remember at the end of. Or, I'm sorry, at the beginning of 2020, I actually started journaling. I've never journaled before. And so in 2020, I started journaling. Every week, I would write down my thoughts and. And I could. I read backstillato, you know, about my excitement and then my dreadfulness as well, too. I mean, it happened real quickly. And so In January of 2021, I knew I'd lose a million dollars, which is a lot of money. And I said, no, no, no, no. Let's try to lose only half a million dollars. Right. And that kept going. February, March. And I'm part of. By March, I'm like, okay, let's sell for whatever. I think when dust settled in April or May, we lost over $6 million. And it.

That had to, like, almost put you out.

Yeah. I mean, you. It was like, how do I recover for this? How do I.

Probably almost everything you had made.

Yeah, Well, I. It. It went through my savings. Now is in debt. I had to pay that debt off, and I didn't even have money for that either. And so you. So many emotions were going through me. It was one. I've had success, you know, according to me, in E Commerce. Yeah. I was going on podcasts like this too. And like. Like, how do I show my face to people?

Number one, everybody thinks you're a success, and you've had all these successful businesses, and now one has pretty much undid, undone all of that success.

Yeah. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard getting out of bed. I knew I was stressed because you had, like, these tingling sensations. I remember my wife would be talking to me for a few minutes, and, like, moments later, I. I go do something. She's like, did you not hear me? And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, I. I was not focused on my kids, my family, my health. You know, I mean, I realized that now. I got pretty depressed because of that too. And it was because I kept questioning myself, like, why did I do that, though? Why was I so greedy? Like, why did I need that extra million dollars or $2 million? Like, what more would I have done with that at that point? That's what I was questioning. And, I mean, I still remember how I felt. This went on for three months. I'm still in a hole. I have no energy. What do I do next? And, you know, Ryan, when you're really up against the wall, you end up doing things sometimes that you normally wouldn't do for me. I. I wouldn't go pick up the phone and, like, try to sell something. I'm. I think I'm just terrible at it. But it forced me to do this, though. Like, I had this domain. We had some product left over. I know, E Commerce. Let's restart the engine. And so I made a roadmap of. With my partners. I said, okay, guys, we're all depressed side. Let's. Let's try to make our money back. So we made this roadmap of making our money back in three years. I knew that if I could get to, like, a million and a half in Ebitda, I could probably sell it for 4x plus. I could make my money back. Let's do that. Great, Shaquille. But we don't really have money for Inventory financing. So we went to, I forgot what the website's called, where you could look at import records of people bringing in different products. We went through the import records and of everybody that imported gloves. And we asked, I, I had my VAs call everybody and say, hey, do you guys have gloves? I'm sure you guys are sitting on overstock of gloves. Can you guys give us to us on consignment? And that's how we got our products was we started getting products on consignment and then selling them through our website. That's how we kind of got it started. One of those connections was a Chinese supplier who we were able to build some activity with. They were overstock as well. They were also going to lose a lot of money. But we were able to sell through and build, you know, give some of the cash back too. They ended up offering us 120 day terms for new products. Because with gloves.com now we've, we sold through some product now. Now we're in sort of the branding phase of we have this cool domain, we have good authority, we've built our SEO. We're ranking number one for gloves and nitrile gloves and latex gloves. We need a brand. And so this factory said, hey, we'll produce the gloves for you and we'll give you, I think it was 150 day net terms after delivery, which was huge for us. And so that's what we did was we started selling through our website. We had these net terms to help build our cash flow. The issue there was, I did no market study on this, Ryan. Nobody really buys gloves online. Like the market is very small. The whole nitrile glove market, it's a billion dollar industry in the USA. 50% is controlled by the medical field and the other 50% is your, your food service, your, your cleaning supplies. But they don't buy online like a very few, small percentage does. The majority of them buy through wholesale. And so we started, we got capped out at our e commerce website. And so I said, okay, we need to do something. We're not going to make our money back. And again it goes to like having your, your, your back against the wall. You, you end up just talking to more people. You start researching more. We went through, what is it called, Clarity fm. We paid like experts for like, like a hundred bucks for fifteen minutes of their call. Like people that have sold gloves and we asked them like, what do we do? And they're like, that's not how you make money online. You have to go through like sales reps, you have to go through wholesale channels. And so we said like, do you know anybody that could sell gloves for us? And he connected with us to somebody who connected us to somebody else. And we essentially were able to create a sales, a sales team to go wholesale our product.

Go sell gloves.

Yeah. And so we're able to build some momentum there. And then came sort of the, the sort of the fun news for me, which was one of our sales reps told us that there's a company for sale who wants to buy it. And I'm like, ooh, B. Oh, I love my company. And it was a 30 year old company that was doing $150 million in annual sales. And I'm like, oh, that's way too big. I don't know what their asking price is going to be. We ended up getting in touch with the seller, which was a public company, Fortune 10 company. And we started talking to them and they ended up telling us that they're divesting away from the non medical division. So this was a non medical company and they're selling it for inventory value. Only the inventory value at the time was still multiple eight figures. I don't remember. I don't have any more money. Right. Like, where do I get that money from? And we did what we were doing for the last six months, which was just grinding and hustling, calling people up, really just, just hey, like sales reps. Do you guys know anybody that's in the finance world, private equity world, commodity financing? Just anybody. We'll talk to anybody. And that's what we did. It was just like call people and you know, made this one pager teaser. Then we made a deck and we just mass emailed mass called people. I think after 30 days we got an interested party.

An interested party in doing what?

Financing the deal for us.

Financing the acquisition of this company that was 30 years old and was a good partnership for the gloves business.

Yeah, because up to that point the only financing I knew really was just leveraging SBAs which at that time had a cap of 5 million bucks that was not going to do anything for this deal. And so the financier that we brought in funded the whole deal for us. We kept majority of the equity as well. We set it up as like debt plus equity. And we acquired this large company and this, that was three years ago. And it, it wasn't easy because we bought the inventory, but not the, the ERP or the people. Um, we just got the inventory so we had to rebuild everything. So we Definitely had a lot of cash flow issues. Uh, this was.

I just. Like that. That's like the period. There were cash flow issues.

Yeah, there. There was cash flow issues. Like it's, you know. But that was 23. And then we were able to acquire more companies, and I was able to get the money I lost, uh, earlier this year.

How did this story end?

So we. That was 23 when we acquired this company. In 24, we bought one of our competitors, financiers, wanted to put in more money. And at the end of 24, we acquired another competitor as well. So that was. We had gloves.com, these three companies. So now there's four companies, and we're a nice sized company. So in February of this year, I said, look, we. I've been in a lot of work. You guys already know that I still have this debt. It's on the company books. Do you guys want to buy that debt and some of my equity and I'll still hang around with the company advice? This wasn't my first time asking, by the way. They knew about it. It's just the timing was right.

So in this case, you had 10 years of reps and profits that basically got flushed down the toilet with one bad deal. Most people would go hide in the corner and cry, ask me how I know. I've done that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been there, too.

And you. It took years and it took work, but you basically leveraged that to keep going until you got the money that you had invested in out of a much bigger deal. Is that what happened? Where did that stick to itiveness come from? Desperation.

You mean? Sort of getting the end result, continuing.

To go down this path even though you're just crushed.

Oh, my God. I. It. It was hard every day. It was your. Your losses stay with you, you know, even until you get past that. Like, I've recovered. Right, but you still have flashbacks of.

Oh, I get it. I mean, I have. I have, you know, 20 years of success, and I have three deals that really killed me. And I still have battle scars that still hurt. Even though I have financially recovered from those, I still feel like I carry those. Those are still with me.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so what do you do with that? I'd say experience. Right. It's a very expensive education. You already invest in that education. What do you. What do you do with it? And so for me was, I woke up every day and I showed up to work. And you have to be positive, because if you wake up, look at your Email and say, oh, past due payment for a factory. Your mood already starts off, off right there. You know, that law of attraction, which is whatever you're thinking is just going to carry you throughout the day. And so I forcefully would just tell myself, I'm happy, I'm good, I had my family to also look after their, my, you know, encouragement, my inspiration, my energy behind a lot of this too. But at the end of the day, as entrepreneurs, you show up every day, you have to, and if you don't, you get left behind.

Or crushed by.

A deal or get crushed by a deal.

So let's reverse the clock a bit because it sounds to me like you had a playbook that was working and that you knew you could plug into any business. And if we look at it long term, some of those plays really worked out.

Yeah.

And then you had one where you deviated from the playbook and that was the one where you got punched in the mouth. So was there a rationale behind that or was it just you saw an opportunity and you decided to try to take advantage of it and that's where you got sucker punched?

I would say it was a opportunity. I would say it was a short term lived opportunity.

Why do you think you were motivated to do that?

Oh, I know it's greed, I mean.

But, but you were already doing well. So. So what, what drove the greed?

Yeah, it honestly was to be more relevant, you know, it was. You had some success in E commerce. You acquire companies. You're one of the first, you know, people in the industry really, to acquire a bunch of these companies before the aggregators even come. How do I stay relevant was a big thing for me.

How do I maintain my position in the marketplace? How do I maintain my brand? Yeah, yeah, that cuts deep.

Yeah, yeah.

I felt, I felt that way after I sold my company. And then like the next thing I did was buy a similar company that I had no business being a part of.

Yeah, yeah.

But I was just trying to stay relevant.

Exactly right. And so trying to stay relevant cost you so much. What are you staying relevant for? Like, you question yourself a lot on this too, right? You, everybody grows. You have to learn and really ask yourself, why are you doing this? Why are you wanting to make more money? Why do you want to get in this industry? Why do you want to, why do you want to make $10 million a year? Like, you know, I see so many times people are like, yeah, if I get to $20 million net worth of revenue, like, but why, like, why is somebody achieving that for what? You know, is this financial freedom? Well, you can make ten grand a month and still, you know, be fine.

You know, I'm, I'm sitting with that question that you just asked because it's making me realize how much of my decisions or thought process or activities are, are based in. You use the word relevance. I would say importance. Looking cool. Like, there's some goals that are intrinsically motivating. Like, I want to sell a million copies of 12 months to 1 million. I'm about halfway there. I felt really good about that because I'm really proud of what I wrote and wanted to be out in the world. But then when I set a target, like I want this company to be a $20 million company, what's the reason behind that? And it's not because what is in the business is so good. I want to share it with the world. It's because I think that $20 million will mean something about me. It will mean something about my importance and how I want people to perceive me. And it sounds to me like you got caught up in that too, and that's where you got punched.

Yeah, I would bet that a lot of people go through this too.

What do you think is a better question to ask? I mean, I mean.

Yeah.

What indicates a good goal?

Yeah, I mean, I, I thought about, I've, I've thought about this question specifically. Like, usually came back to what, what does my family want to remember me as? But that felt too generic and not real for me.

Well, let's take, let's take the example of this challenge coins business.

Yeah.

You didn't set out to take a $200,000 company to an eight figure exit. What did you set out to do? Like, what was the goal there?

Yeah, I'd say early on the goal post moved quite a bit upwards, but it was to create as much money as I can to create as much wealth as I can. Again. Remember, I didn't ever want to be poor again. So it was to run away from that. But then also, how do I really optimize my lifestyle? Have the highest hourly rate. And so I kept pushing that number higher and higher.

But was it more incremental?

Yeah.

Versus the, the big swing for the fences. You were like, just trying to make money fast to stay relevant.

Yeah. Before, before that, gloves. It was just incremental. But when I saw this opportunity where I could fast track myself 10 years, I, I took advantage and I failed. And I, I wouldn't even think in 21 that I'd be here saying the story that, Yeah, I got through that, you know, And I'm sure you could relate there too. Like, this shit is hard, man. It is.

It's interesting reflecting on it now four or five years in the future, because you and I were both licking our wounds on the other side of COVID making some bad decisions that were both ego driven, and we both kind of got caught up in what could be and how we could stay relevant and both got punished for it and, and have gotten to the other side, but are now, in a weird way, sort of looking for relevance in a different way. So how do you make decisions now that you've had big successes and big losses? You can do anything, but you're financially whole again. What lens do you look at opportunities now?

I'm still chasing something. It's a different asset, and that's time. I am chasing freedom to be able to work whenever I want to. So, I mean, I, I, I'm happy to say that I'm on that path and I'm on that journey. And it feels, I mean, you, you, number one, you cannot just jump in and say, yeah, I want to buy this business, but I want to work whenever. It doesn't work like that. But, you know, I've worked very hard to get to this point, and now it's not. Yes, I've bought over 30 businesses. Yes, these real estate deals are big, but I've changed it to where what's predictable income for me, E Commerce, as you know, has a lot of swings. Algorithm shifts, supplier chain issues. Like, those things could just shift things real quickly. And I wanted something more predictable, a little more safer, which, you know, my family was already in the real estate, and so I had those learnings, the failed strategies already there. And so this is the route I've chosen right now is just having the freedom of time right now.

Shaquille, obviously you've had your big wins and your big losses. So I'm curious, now that you've had both of those perspectives, how would you look at buying a business today? I mean, if you had not been made whole in your last oops. And you were starting over, now you might go back to the playbook that got you to building the eight figure businesses from a $200,000 acquisition. So what would you be looking for in those first few acquisitions to rebuild the portfolio?

So over the course of the last 12 or 13 years, I've looked at several business models, from E Commerce to wholesale businesses to franchises, to, like, convenience stores as well, too. If I were to redo do it again. I would, I would not go buy a business tomorrow. I would just take a step back and research what I like to do. What am I good at? Number one, that's what anybody should do is are you good at writing content? Well then go find a content business or a business that's lacking content. If you're a designer, go find a business that maybe their conversion rate is very low and they just need to optimize their images or website speed. Right. Or three is you're just a good leader and so go find a mismanaged business. But first you have to ask yourself is like, what am I good at? Because if you're able to plug in what you're good at with the missing component that creates maximized value.

Yeah.

Versus if you and a lot of people do this is they get excited with the becoming entrepreneur, going by a business and they go buy like the first like two or three deals they look at. That's a big mistake because if you fail at that, it is so hard.

Yeah.

To go buy something again. You won't even believe in that model anymore. You're going to work corporate for the rest of your life. So it's very important that your basis is, is solid. And so look at yourself first and see what you're good at. Once you know that, then go find that business. It could be again, E commerce. It could be, it could be a nail salon, it could be a dental practice, you know, just, just owning stuff.

You're looking for where your skill set is of the maximum value that can be plugged into a business that is not doing that. And therefore there is a natural value creation that happens.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and depending on that industry. So let's say it's E commerce. Reach out to the different brokers, like literally Google E commerce brokers join, go to ChatGPT and say, Hey, I want to go buy E commerce business. Which masterminds, which forums, which brokers should I join? So step number two is increase your awareness, your knowledge base about that specific industry.

There's always a good old boys club in any industry.

Yeah.

And so if you want to buy businesses, there's good old boys clubs of people who buy businesses. So you get plugged into that and all of a sudden you see what other people don't see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. So know your skill set, gain some knowledge and then go start looking for the business. Right. And I think the number one question I usually get asked about buying businesses is fine, I'm good at this. Fine I've learned about this. I want to buy a million dollar business. Where do I get $1 million from? Right, yeah. Yes. That is, it's a hard roadblock to get through, but you can be very creative in those ways.

What do you mean?

So I'll give you a good example. I haven't got an SBA loan since 2018, so things have changed. But that is a very popular financing option where you can buy business for 10% down. Right. So $1 million business, you only have to put down 100,000. So 9, 800,000 of it would be bank financed and the other 10% can be seller financed. Right. And so, yes, you still have to come with the first $100,000. How do you, how do you do that? And friends, family, you could see if you have equity on your house or.

You can sell your way through it. You can get involved in the business and use the skill set that you bring to the table to generate that cash in order to make that down payment. I have seen and heard of people doing that actually going into the business and generating the revenue needed for the down payment. And that completes the transaction.

Yeah, but I've also seen people where they just say, oh, I have to come with a hundred thousand and then they're out. Yeah. So it's how badly do you want it? Right. You know, yes, I struggle in 2021, 2022, but it was how badly do I want to get out of it? And so that is what's going to push people through, is how badly do you want to be able to have the freedom of time, to be able to travel with your family or whatever you're trying to get? How badly do you want it? And so that forces you to think outside the box, to do things that you normally wouldn't, to be creative. And so you need that drive to get to that next step.

And it sounds like for you, when you have been up against the wall, you have knocked on the doors of other people. The way that you developed that playbook has not been sitting here trying to figure out how it has been going out and finding the people that you need in order to accomplish something. Like that's a theme that I keep hearing you bring up. Like you buy a business, you install somebody, you run into a problem, you say, who are the wholesalers or the brokers? I want to find a deal, so who can bring me a deal? You're looking a lot at who you surround yourself with more than the know how of how to fix something. Am I making that up. Am I projecting that or is that something that is going on in your brain?

You've summed it up correctly. I didn't really think about it like that. But yeah, you're absolutely correct. Is people around you have knowledge of something that you either don't want to learn through trial and error or B, you just don't know. And so you rely on somebody that knows that knowledge. And so that's what I do is I have this knowledge base that I just can tap into to do the next thing.

I think there's a humility in that. I'm having this very interesting self reflection as I'm hearing you talk because the way that I'm processing your business model is very simple and I'm realizing how little time I put into putting the right people in place. I put a lot of effort into figuring something out and doing it. And as a result I'm very busy and I'm wondering what my life would look like if I put more attention into finding the right person for X. And so as we're sitting here, I have this portfolio of brands. I know I need to install a really good CEO for one of the brands and that's gotten 5% of my focus this week. What if it got 50?

Yeah.

And that would mean that over the next month I may be doing nothing but talking to people and then I would find that person and that business would be much better off for the next maybe many years. And so I'm just having this reflection of why I sometimes feel stuck and busy. And it is probably because I think I'm smarter than I really am. I think I can figure it out and work at it and keep a long to do list. And those are my least happy days. And you've done the opposite. You've looked at who you can install into different places and that has both taken you very far and dug you out of really dark places.

Well, Ryan, you are smart, number one. Thank you. Appreciate that.

And muscly and beardy.

Yeah. I don't know if it's. I think I've just learned this sort of readapt in myself over the years. Is I, number one, I know I'm not. My attention to detail is not good. So you know, in terms of like growth, operations, marketing, I am not interested in being behind that and just having that as a daily grind and giving myself a pat on the back that I said, oh, I'm the one that's behind this marketing channel or behind this product launch. That's not where I get Excited, I get excited. I used to get really excited about profits, you know, and so whatever is at the bottom line, my team created. But I get super excited about that too. And so that was kind of my pat on the back. And so, yeah, I would put experts, I would hire people to do that. My job was just to passively manage these people, making sure that they had their metrics, they knew what they were doing, and I just stepped back.

How do you know when it is time to part ways with a partner or a manager?

It's very hard. Actually. It is hard because for somebody in my seat that takes a step back, more laid back, which means I let more things flow through than they should. So it is harder for me. But I know, I know it's time for me to move on. When I have to step into the business more, number one or number two, the company is going backwards like something's wrong. I have empowered you. I've given you the resources to maintain the business. That, that's, that's my minimum goal is just to maintain. And if you cannot do that, we need to think about somebody else.

There's something really relieving about the goal being just maintaining.

Oh yeah.

I remember when I ran the numbers about if I wanted to hit my financial goals from my portfolio, how much did we need to grow per month? And it was like 8.8%. Now growing 8.8% per month is not necessarily a small feat, but it's super manageable versus trying to double this quarter. And I had this experience where I relaxed quite a bit and said, ah, I mean, all we need to do in order to grow 8% this month is fix reviews on this product or get a good product launch for that product that's coming out the pipeline. It was an amazing focusing tool to realize that I didn't need to grow that much. And in your case, the idea of all you need to do is maintain. There's something really relieving about that because if you maintain you're servicing the debt, you're paying it down and then you have a cash producing asset that is free and clear and you can flip. Is that, is that, is that right?

Yeah.

So there's, there's something, there's something really poetically beautiful about that. To me, there's something really low stress about. This business doesn't need to grow, it just needs to maintain.

Yeah, it is. But I, I wouldn't even say it's, it's the right way. I've, I've seen, I. Some of my CEOs what they're super good at is saying, Shaquille, this is the goal I've set for the next three years and I'm going to do that in the next six months. Right. So they, they challenge themselves. So, so you need somebody to be challenging the business for you though, you know, I think that's. That you definitely need somebody. Yes. For me, my, my, I'm, I, I would be super okay if the business just maintained. Right. That's kind of my, my baseline stress level. Some people have to grow it by 20% a year or they're super stressed. Right. So it's kind of that delta. And I think if you're relaxed, you're able to, I think just be more creative, make sound decisions way better. And so that's kind of where the difference happens, is just chill the hell out, man. Yeah.

You made this point about finding where you personally can add value. I'm curious about the strategy of looking at where a business can provide value when acquiring another business. So you have put businesses together that had complementary assets. Our friend Carl Allen will talk about finding the superpower of a business and plugging that into another business with a different superpower and crossing them and cross promoting those two superpowers. I'm curious your take on that, of looking where an individual business has outsized value and applying that to another acquisition.

It's, it's definitely a superpower for sure. When you're in the supplements industry, as an example, and we've done this for another business too, where you're already on Amazon selling supplements, but then you buy another supplements business that just sells on Shopify. Right. So with that you have to look at sort of the external value that it creates. So this business is making a million dollars. This business also makes a million dollars. Now you're at 2. However, you have diversified traffic now, which bumps up the multiples as well as the business. That's kind of the key driver for me. But then there could be other things where now you could upsell each customer. Maybe it's nutrition supplements and this is another kind of supplements. Right. So there's upsell opportunities there, which is huge. I mean that's, that's another value add on. You could do with bolt on acquisitions.

Do you ever acquire businesses and keep the management that is in place or are you always looking to find a partner or a manager within your network and plugging them into the business?

Most of the businesses I've bought have been these single entrepreneurs that are the owner and operator of the business that don't want to come with the business. So, yeah, sometimes I've kept those on and given them some kind of chat.

GPT to answer that.

You can enable chat. Whoa. Chat GPT.

They're always listening.

That was crazy. I've kept previous owners on, on sort of this, not sort of it. This earn out where if the business performs as it did for the last 12 months, you'll get your full payout. So it forces them to work in the business as well too, while they train somebody else to take over the business. So I've done that, but most of the time I've had to start with a clean slate and find somebody.

So have most of the deals that you have acquired been fairly small?

Yeah, I'd say if you go from sort of a numbers perspective, most of them are small, but sort of the range is fairly big because we have that big acquisition. These real estate deals are really big too.

Now that you have sold off a good percentage of your portfolio and you're in a healthy financial position, what drives your decision making for what is meaningful to pursue? You've experienced what it's like to listen to your ego and you know how painful that is. So what drives your decision making in business now?

I still struggle with that, Ryan. It's right now, if I look at myself today, it's having the freedom of time. I'm still doing these deals, but it's. What does the next 10 years look like? I mean, I like to really challenge myself and keep moving things forward. So what wakes me up every day?

What does wake you up every day?

You know, the right answer should be my family, Ryan, but it's definitely them. But it's, it's still, for me, optimizing right now. It's a different form of optimizing. So before it was optimizing the business and maintaining, you know, ensuring that it's optimized and it maintains. And now that I've gotten over my drought, it's optimizing my time. And it's, it's a different form of challenge because I did work a lot. I mean, I was working, you know, 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And so now it's different. And so how do I optimize my time? Like, how do I come here and, you know, hang out with my friends? And so that's what wakes me up right now. It could be different next year. And I hope I get to a point where I have sort of some kind of philanthropy nonprofit that, you know, gets me excited for that I could contribute with I'm. Right now. I.

Is it fair to say that you. You are looking for meaning right now?

Yeah. Yeah, I am. Yeah.

Where do you think that you hoped to find it in business? And you experience both sides of it, and you realize life is kind of the same either way.

It is. I mean, yes. Because as entrepreneur, most of your time, your brain space ends up going towards your business. And so now you've had success, you buy the cars, but you know it's true. Like, what do you feel about it? And it's. You get bored of it. And so what is. You've dreamed about having this financial freedom, financial time, and I'm getting there. And this assets. But now what?

Yep. I was sitting here with Ben Hardy, who just wrote the Science of Scaling, which I loved. I found it very challenging for me because one of the opening moves is set a goal so impossible you think you can't hit it, and it kind of aligns your focus. And I have wrestled with that for so long, since he was sitting here of. None of these goals really feel meaningful. They feel like a grind. And I'm just curious if the experience that you and I have both had, which is that we pursue a financial goal and we realize how bad that can hurt. Like, I never want to do those three years ever again.

Oh, yeah.

And neither do you.

Oh, yeah.

And there is something about setting a financial goal where you're like, I don't know. I don't know that I have the juice for it. Is that getting old? Is that getting wise? I'm not sure. I'm wrestling with that right now. Where is there. Where can I put my attention to where there's juice again? And that has been my struggle for the last year. And when things are going really well, like, if the YouTube channel is growing, I can get real excited about that growth. But if nothing is really hitting, I deal with those existential questions. The look in your eye says I'm not the only one.

I was just thinking about our journey, Ryan, which was we met 10 years ago. You know, we had success, we had failures kind of around the same time. What you're saying resonated with me so much, because that's exactly how I feel too, you know, and so that's what I. It's very interesting that you're going through that too.

Well, three or four years ago, we were sitting there wondering how we were gonna get through, like, one crisis where we were both dealing with financial setbacks. We're at a much higher quality problem now where we're Sitting here and said, well, we're through that now we can deal with what is meaningful and exciting for us.

Yeah.

And I think we probably would have looked ahead and been like, I hope we're dealing with those problems where we're wondering what gets us out of bed in the morning. Do you use excitement as a filter for what you pursue now?

Yeah.

And, and, and is that why you're not pursuing a lot of new stuff?

You're. You're like my therapist right now. Right. It's an interesting choice of words because I'm just like, hey, you are, you are in my brain. This is, I've been thinking this, but I'm not saying this. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely correct. I, I dopamine, rush or whatever it is like, yeah, that it's. Something is missing. I don't know what it is, but yeah, it's the excitement that drives the energy. And I, I don't know what that is right now.

We used to get excitement out of a hope of a better tomorrow. Right. And I think you and I have both dealt with major setbacks where the hope of tomorrow was just getting rid of this big ouch that we had, and we've both done that. And now it's like looking for the next mountain to climb that is meaningful. And the hope of a better financial tomorrow doesn't really do it anymore. And I love acquisitions. I love growing businesses. I love growing stuff and people. And yet if there's not like a soul at the center of it, it's no longer interesting, which is both. There's probably something beautiful in that, but there's also something like you. I just miss when I got excited about the growth.

Yeah. We're trying to rewire our brain from what we knew for the last 15 years. Building businesses, acquiring them, making money. You learn all this stuff along the way. Now you have recovered from your losses. What. What am I going to chase next? Now, it was always, I knew what I was going to do, and it was the stepping stone. But what's my next stepping stone? And I think now we kind of can breathe and say, okay, now I could take some time in deciding what that next stepping stone is. And until then, part of me stays anxious. Am I wasting my skill sets when I could be doing something more or am I doing something good, which is sort of taking this mini break? And it's, it's something I wrestle with, and it's just finding that meaning next.

You had a fairly large exit last year. What did you do with the money?

I I put some money into liquid assets. So your crypto, your stock market, a little bit in CDs. The rest of it, I. I mean, I bought. Bought the car, and then the rest of it I put into real estate. And real estate is a nice business to have. In fact, I think a lot of E commerce people should do real estate for. For the tax advantage and the appreciation of the assets.

I think Internet entrepreneurs should put their money into something like some investing plan that is not just yoloing on crypto.

Yeah, yeah.

My life got exponentially better when I was just like, I'm going to have a boring investing plan so that I can go kill it in business, and my investments are just going to compound forever and ever and ever. Amen.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know why it took me so long to figure that one out. That maybe the same mindset for killing it in business was not okay. For killing it with my investment portfolio.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's. It's just a matter of. I did the same thing too, Ryan. I mean, but it was because. Mostly because of the people I hung out with was also doing the same thing. And so I only transitioned recently, and, you know, a lot of the money went into real estate buying land, and I'm going to be developing them.

Shaquille, there's something in your story that doesn't add up to me. I want to find the hole. I want to fill this hole that I found. And that is, from what I know about you, you bought this like 50,000 square foot house. It's not really 50,000 square foot, but you have this giant house that I believe you acquired while you were going through the whole financial oops when you were like, trying to get by. How are you also expanding your lifestyle?

That was a sort of a timing thing that happened. That house we, we started building in 2019.

Oh, you built that house?

Yeah, yeah, we custom made it. So it just happened so that we moved in 2020 when the worst timing of my life.

Oh, so you bought the house, like, built the house based on the price profits that you had made from previous businesses, and then you went into the financial oops.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a double suck.

Oh, yeah, it was. It was hard. And, you know, most people should not buy their house in cash because the interest rates are low. So, yeah, I mean, I took on major debt for that, and that's why it was hard. Like, you have no money, but then you have this loan to pay, you have a house to pay, you have family to Provide that takes a toll on you and the amount of stress and like, how am I gonna get through this? And you're doubting yourself. It crushes the hell out of you. Yeah. So it was a timing thing. Not, you know, not that I'm drowning in debt and I'm taking on more debt.

Looking back, are you glad you went through that? I'm not. I'm not there yet. Like, I'm not ready to say I'm glad I went through all that.

Yeah. It's funny because I asked myself that a lot. Every week. Some weeks, I tell myself I'm glad I went through that because I learned this or I wouldn't have been able to do this. And some days I'm just like, man, like, what I went through it. It's honestly, it's made me a little more risk averse in the sense that, you know, old me would take on this deal, new me does not want to take on the risk. So I sometimes think about if I didn't go through this, like, my E Commerce still would have had that exit anyways. I think because that was irrelevant to this other business, would I have been a different person? For the better or worse is sometimes I think about, and then right away I'm just like, whatever it's happened, let's move on. Shaquille, I cannot change the past. Let's learn from it.

Earlier, I brought up what I thought Shaquille's playbook was and how he now applies this to businesses. And there's something else that is coming up, which is you're looking for opportunities. Now you look for low risk opportunities. And before, you kind of looked for low risk opportunities until you just sank everything into the one high risk opportunity. But you're. You're looking at opportunities like, where can I bring my cash back? And how can I maintain? These are low risk opportunities. And you're constantly looking to build your network of people that can support that. You're looking at where you can build more efficiencies and increase profit margin. And then this interesting thing in your plan, which is you have a growth plan, but you leave room for serendipity. Like, you leave room for the trip to China where you're gonna have a breakthrough. You leave room for when you meet that wholesaler that opens up doors for you. And it sounds like the plan has been to buy smart, to acquire smart, to grow slow and steady, and once in a while, a grand slam works our way in. And there's something really intriguing about this to me because I'LL tell you, Shaquille, when I try to manufacture the Grand Slam, that's where I lose my ass. And your plan has been, for the most part, slow and steady. And then the Grand Slam comes, and when you've deviated from that and you swing for the fences, it's when you strike out. Am I oversimplifying what you're saying, or is that a pretty accurate description of how you pursue things?

It's pretty accurate. It's not that I'm waiting for opportunities or to get lucky. I'm not saying slow and steady will win the race. But it's. If your sole goal is to maintain the business, you take the pressure off you, which in a way, improves your lifestyle. If you had that mindset that I just. Whatever I bought it for, I want to resell it for the same amount. Because you're still making the income during those years. Right. So as long as that fits your lifestyle, that's good. And so for me, that I go for that mindset because it improves my mood and sort of my life. And so to your point. Yes. I mean, that's the way I look at businesses.

What would you say to the entrepreneur that hasn't had their big win yet? Because I think most entrepreneurs who are still on the climb are trying to swing for the fences. You got to where you are by slow and steady, and then the Grand Slam finds its way to you.

Yeah.

So what would you say to the entrepreneur who hasn't had their. Their big win yet?

Keep going. Persistence is super key. I had 10 failures before I had one success and then had failures again and a success after that, too. So you have to keep going. It's part of your journey. I think that's the biggest thing, is it's so easy to give up. Like, I could just say, I'm giving up. I'm gonna go play it safe. I'm gonna go work corporate. But what was that. That initially pushed you? What was that drive? Go find that drive again. That's the thing, is you will not succeed your first time. Very, very few people do. You have to keep going. Yeah. And keep swinging. I. I took little bunts along the way. You could try to hit it, you know, 10 times, and one will be a home run. I mean, there's different ways to do it. At the end of the day, you have to keep going.

And is it fair to say that you've intentionally maintained space in your calendar and in your processes for you to pursue the next breakthrough, for you to pursue the next contact, for you to pursue the next serendipitous thing. Has that been an intentional thing throughout most of your career?

No, it hasn't.

Only recently.

Yeah. Only recently.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. It always wasn't like that. My. You know, keep in mind that I was working four hours a week on each business on average, was what I was trying to maintain 10 businesses. I was still working full time. And you're not able to focus on one business. You. You do. You have extreme add, and so that gets tiring. So I did not have sort of that space that I do today, and it's just a weird feeling to have right now.

A weird feeling to have space.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, I want to share with you what I have taken away from this conversation. I hope that my podcast grows to millions of subscribers and followers. I've done it for 15 years. I'll probably do it for another 15 years. But I think the real benefit that I get is what I learned from these conversations. And the thing that I've taken away from this conversation is, first of all, how much better my life would be if I put more attention into finding the next right person, not the next right strategy or even learning the next thing. If I put my energy into finding the next right person. My life would be so much better in a year if I spent three months finding the right person, and then the next right person and then the next right person. And the second thing that I wrote down was I might as well be happy while I'm doing this, because we've experienced the excitement of the climb, the dread of the crash, and on the other side, what we want is fulfillment throughout the entire process. And I put so much pressure on myself to perform and to crush it and to maintain an appearance of crushing it. I might as well just enjoy the process. And there's gonna be good months and bad months and good years and bad years. I might as well just enjoy the whole thing. Thank you for reminding me of that.

Got it. Ryan.

Shaquille, it's good to see you as always, my friend.

Good to see you, my man.

Congratulations on making it to the other side. Excited for you.

You as well. This will be a fun journey. Ryan, we're gonna do this again in a few years.

Yes, we will.

Lessons learned then, too.

Yes, we will. I look forward to it.