Growing A Business To $100m With Mike Dillard

Foreign.

Welcome to Freedom Fastlane.

Ryan.

Daniel Moran here and one of the individuals that has had the biggest impact on me in the last year has been Mike Dillard. And the reason why Mike has had such a cool impact on me is because I've watched what he has done and listened to him talk about the philosophy behind it all. Mike is building a big disruptor company that he expects to do tens of millions of dollars within the first few months. He's assembled a board of advisors all of whom have built hundred million dollar plus companies. Mike is also spending millions of dollars of his own money into this venture and he's paying for it using traditional Internet marketing strategy of selling high ticket products, developing funnels and sales machines that are really, really simple. Like I looked at his processes and was like, Mike, this is actually really darn simple. And he's like, I have to keep it simple. I'm building another company. But he's using that cash flow to fund the rest of the business that he's building out his hydroponics company. It's an absolutely fascinating case study to watch unfold and that's why I invited Mike to speak at Freedom Fast Lane Live 2016. What I have not told you yet is that we are also bringing in his entire board of advisors. The entire board is made up of people who run hundred million dollar plus companies.

That's right, they've all run hundred million dollar companies. All of them. And we got the whole board to come in to sit down to say how do you plan to make this company a hundred million dollar company? And so we're going to hear the perspectives of these different board members who are going to say this is how we're going to get this company that hasn't even launched yet to the 100 million dollar point. It's going to be a beautiful way to cap off Freedom fast lane live 2016 to whet your appetite for this round table. Today we're going to replay our interview with Mike Dillard that was previously released here on the Freedom Fast Lane podcast where he talks about how he has the one company that is the cash flow business and the other that is is hopefully $100 million plus disruptor company and how he's playing the two together and how he plans to launch this second business. This will whet your appetite for what we will dive deeper into this December as well as what will be discussed at the roundtable. To cap off the towards the end of Freedom fast lane live 2016, I hope you'll join us in Austin, Texas until then, enjoy this chat with Mike Dillard.

Mike Dillard, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Yeah, looking forward to it, brother. Thanks for having me.

Mike, I want to kick things off because you've inspired me and you're also a couple years ahead of me on the pivot from a cash flow business into what I would call a disruptor business. And you're working on your billion dollar. And I want to go into that. But first, I was hoping you could give those of you who aren't familiar with you a little bit into your background, because not everybody knows that you're as much of a NINJA as you are, and they should. So tell us about your NINJA background.

Yeah, sure, man. Thanks. You know, I got started as an entrepreneur, if you will, my senior year in college. Believe it or not, it was in the network marketing industry. And that was around the year 1999. 2000.ish. I was just looking for something to do that I could work for myself and that I could make a large amount of money. My goal at the time was $50,000 a month. @ some point in my future, if I ever got to that number, I would be over the moon, ecstatic. I was looking for ways to do that, and network marketing popped up in front of me. The whole leverage side of that appealed to me. It made sense. I spent the next five or six years pursuing that industry. Failing entire time along the way for the first.

Five.

Does that mean failing? Is that like calling grandma and ask her to buy everything juice or.

Something? Yeah, trying everything. Dropping flyers around parking lots and cold calling out of phone books and buying leads and everything. I finally realized that this isn't working and that it wasn't the business's fault or the opportunity's fault. There was a piece of the puzzle here that was messed up and that was me. And I. What I realized is that if you want to get paid an extraordinary amount of income, you have to bring an extraordinary skillset to the table that will allow you to execute on that and actually accomplish it. I stopped looking at ground floor opportunities and I stopped looking at products. And then I pivoted and I said, okay, I'm going to focus on increasing my skillset. I dove into Direct Response in a huge way at that time, diving into everything by Dan Kennedy and Yannick Silver and Joe Polish and all of those guys, discovered what that meant, discovered how to advertise, discovered how to write ad copy, and learned, or at least realized that I could apply all of those skill sets to the network marketing industry, which nobody was really doing at the time. As a result, I went from waiting tables at a P. F Chang's to making my first million bucks within the next 18 months.

I did that for probably four or five years. I built my first successful downline, if you will. I was the number one residual income earner in a company for a couple of years. I wrote a bunch of books and courses that turned into an eight figure publishing company. Had my first office and employees and all of that stuff. After about five years, I got bored. I said everything that I had wanted to say. There were really no more challenges for me in that world to.

Accomplish. I know that.

Feeling. Yeah. So I decided to transition to my next weakest link personally, which was money. I had learned how to make money, but I never learned how to successfully invest that money or save that money at that point in my life. And so I'd been making millions of dollars a year in my 20s. I'm single, I'm having the time of my life with Aston Martins and mansions and boats and travel and all kinds of stuff. And at the end of the day, by the time I turned 30, I was not broke. But I didn't have any assets to show for all of the success that I had had. So the money went out as quickly as it came in. So realized I needed to change that. I decided to start a new business, which is what I typically do, is start a business around my biggest problem or passion. That started a company called the Elevation Group. And the concept there was, you know what? I'm going to start a private diary and I'm going to go around the country and I'm going to interview successful entrepreneurs who have made that transition from just not making money, but also investing it, protecting it, and building. True. We.

That company was really successful. We sold access to that for $97 a month or 600 bucks for the year. In the first seven days when I launched it, we acquired 8,600 customers. Did about $3.2 million in revenue in the first week. By the end of the first year, we had done eight figures, had an office, had a team of about a dozen.

People. I want to interrupt you, and I didn't expect to ask you this.

Question.

Sure. But I was a customer, a client of that. And the sales process was wonderful. You had rabid customers that were in that group, but you also had a series of pretty substantial setbacks when you were building that or things that didn't go how you expected.

To put it mildly. Yeah, I mean, everything from Being partnered or working with people that weren't who you thought they were or who they said they weren't, to things like predictions you make about silver or future assets not going the way you thought, that's partly the business that you're in. But I'm curious how you dealt with some of those.

Setbacks. Sure, yeah. The premise of that company, which was stated from moment one in the entire sales process, was, I am not the expert. I have no idea what I'm doing. And so the reason I started this business was to figure it out. And if you want to come along and figure it out with me, then great, join the adventure. And that was really the sales pitch. And so it was really important for me to be authentic to my customer base and not try to pretend to be someone that I wasn't. And so I was honest. I was like, I am the idiot here, and I'm just trying to figure this out. So I think that was an important piece of the puzzle and why it was so successful as far as the challenges go.

From studying finance, I've realized two things that every mentor that I've come across since then in that world will say, which is, you can be right in your prediction or you can be on time in your prediction, but you can never be both. And that will be the case. Anyone who tries to be right and also tries to be correct on the timeline of that trend will fall on their face. That's just kind of like karma in the way that that world works. So pick.

One. But the consumer wants it. Like, what's going to be a hit right now? Yeah, that's a bit of a.

Mismatch. Yeah. And fortunately, we really focused on very conservative investment strategies, because from an entrepreneur's perspective, we take all of our risk on the making money side. We put risk into building the business, building the products, putting up the marketing campaigns, hiring the employees. So for us, we put an extraordinary amount of risk on the table on that side of the house, which means our goal once we make money is to not lose it. It's to be super conservative. And so this is a conclusion that I learned after going through all of these interviews with all of the experts that we had on evg, and all of them being really successful entrepreneurs who've amassed wealth. They're like, mike, your job is to go out and make money and build companies and to not lose the money that you.

Make. I 100% agree. You make your money in your business. That's step one. It's only secondary to your health. Probably as far as roi, and then you invest it for long term growth. Inflation.

Shields. Yeah, exactly. And so that's really what we focused on. The one time we stepped outside of that box is after doing 18 interviews and 18 months of really conservative stuff. And we had had a plan that was working really, really well. We're like, okay, well, let's go explore some riskier stuff that can bring, bring along the potential for some pretty extraordinary returns. Now that we've got this really conservative foundation in place, let's go figure that out. We ended up interviewing this guy down in Australia who was in the forex market. I bought his products, I liked his course. He sent us over some documentation on his company's returns because they had a private managed fund in the forex market that you could invest in. Everything looked really, really good. We went and spent three days with him filming down in Australia, came back, our audience loved it. So we end up promoting this guy. And I don't. I want to this. I could spend the entire podcast on this story. But the long story short is this guy ends up being a con artist. He's a part of a huge ring of guys who are all over the world who've been doing this for 10 or 15 years. They stole a lot of people's money that invested with them, about 60% of it, mine included. So we blew the whistle on them. We called the FBI, we called the SEC and the CFTC and all of those funnel organizations and basically said, these guys are doing something bad, you need to go handle this. And so they did. But the shitty part for us is the moment that news started to get out, all of the trolls and people out there who were waiting to find a chink in my armor found it and they pounced on that. And all of a sudden I'm in all of these blog posts and articles where Mike's a scam artist and all of that fun stuff. And so that really, really sucked. But I got some great advice from Mark Ford, Michael Masterson is his pen name, who was one of the mentors that we interviewed during the course. And he had gone through something similar in his career 15, 20 years ago, where there was some bad press or something that he was involved in. He's like, Mike, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to just be totally transparent with your audience around the entire thing as much as you can. And the interesting part is when you're going through a legal thing like that, you're not allowed to say anything. And that's a frustrating piece of the puzzle. But as soon as we were, I took that advice to heart and I wrote a 30 page blog post. And the goal was just to be completely transparent and not to sway people one way or another. It's just to say, hey, here's the facts, here's what happened. I'll let you guys make up your own mind. And we put transcripts of all of the affidavits and everything in there and all of that fun stuff. I sent that out. There were about 1,000 people affected who invested with this guy in our audience. But I sent that out to our entire database, which was between 4 and 500,000 people, which means I'm probably bringing this up to 90% of our audience who haven't even heard about the issue.

Yet. I want to highlight something and clarify this because you said something very interesting at the top of this podcast, which was you realize when you were struggling in network marketing that the problem wasn't anything outside of you. It wasn't the opportunity, that the common thread here was you, and that you had needed to get better and that you basically took responsibility for the gap between where you were and where you wanted to be. And that was how you navigated through that. And I think a lot of people would have taken the opposite. Most people do take the opposite approach when something doesn't go the way they want, whether it's in relationships, health, it's not my fault I'm fat, it's not my fault that I'm broke, it's not my fault that I'm divorced or whatever it is. And that is, I think, why most people stay in that position. I'm just interested that you took kind of a similar route when business didn't go how you expected. And it was like, you know what, I'm going to own up to this. I'm going to be transparent about this. And that was, from what I can tell, the way that you navigated through.

That. Yeah. And I think that you have to. That, to me, is the difference between an opportunity seeker and a real entrepreneur. Because when you're a real entrepreneur, you don't have another choice. The reason you are a successful entrepreneur is because you do take responsibility for your actions and decisions and everything else. And that's why you've made it and you're self employed. Whether you're making $10,000 a month or $100,000 a month. Those who don't will remain opportunity seekers for the rest of their lives. So, yeah, I mean, that was the common thread here. And I'M in a position now where I put my trust into a guest. That guest took really bad intentions and used deceit and forged documents and all of this crap to take advantage of me in order to steal from myself and my audience and to cause them harm. And once they've decided to do that, there's not much you can do about it. Like you can't control their actions. And so essentially my reputation had been hijacked by these guys and I needed to do what I needed to do to save that. And the best way to do it is to just be completely honest and transparent with your audience. Because all of us are going to screw up. We are going to make mistakes. And so the most important thing that you can do when it comes to your customer base is just admit that. Because what is unbelievably rare in this world is to find a vendor or a company who will own up to their mistakes and be public about it. Which means that, you know, you can trust them moving forward. Even if they do something wrong, they're going to be honest about it. And that's such a rare thing that people appreciate that and they gravitate towards it. And that's what happened with me in this situation. We put up this blog post, it's still up there on elevationgroup.com to this day. And I think 300 or 400 super positive comments were left there below it. There was two or three that were really negative, but the rest were, thank you so much for your transparency. Thank you for sticking up for us and all of that stuff. But yeah, that was a two year ordeal that tanked the company. My business partner, Robert, got leukemia because of the stress. I was getting divorced, going through that process as well. I've got my business partner dying, I've got my marriage coming to an end and I've got my business that's been imploded and I'm dealing with these jackasses. It was definitely a trial. Well, it was a bad two or three years, but it was trial by fire and obviously extremely valuable lessons learned from that. But the right decisions were made and as a result of that, we made it through and here we are. That was in 2012. Here we are at the start of 2016, and my audience is still here, my customer base is still here. It's really, I'm not going to say bigger than ever, but it's trending that.

Way. So that's where I want to go next because I agree with you that the transparency is the way, because it's Such a lacking commodity today's in today's market, if you.

Will.

Yeah. And you are among the best I've seen at growing and engaging an audience that can rally behind an idea. You've done it on your podcast, Self Made Man. You've done it on just the brand of Mike Dillard, which you can pretty much put a company on the map with an email, it seems. So I want to hear some of the strategies that you've utilized to build and maintain that audience because there's been people who've been following you for five, six years, 10 years, maybe even, and they continue to gravitate towards you in whatever project that you're doing. I say that the audience is the lifeblood of any business. And there's been people who have been following you from your network marketing days to your Elevation group days, to now, the Self Made man days, and following your disruptor companies as well. So before we talk about that disruption company, would you address that approach you take when building a large and rabid.

Audience? The common thread between all of them now is authenticity and intent. Meaning that I only start businesses around topics that I feel super passionate about. I've never started a business to make money. I've always started a business to solve a problem that I have personally. And because it's a personal problem for me, I spend all my time researching it or trying to get better at it. I'm super passionate about it for the vast majority of times. If I have a particular problem, there's a huge market of other people out there who have that problem as well. It hasn't been very hard to decide what types of businesses to start because again, it just comes from internally. And once you have that intent and that authenticity behind your message, you can speak passionately about it. And when you can speak passionately about it, the world listens. So that really has been, I guess, the formula behind all of my companies. When I launched Magnetic Sponsoring in the network marketing industry, which was an ebook that I wrote around that industry, that really disrupted it. The tagline was for my ads at the time was only suckers buy leads. It was basically exposing the lead sales industry, which the vast majority of new distributors out there rely on. And they buy these leads 10 years ago that are five, $10. Five to $10 apiece. They end up being pretty much worthless. They're spending their last 300 bucks a month on these leads and they're just crap. It was a huge, huge industry. I came out with the book and I said, look, this is just a Bunch of bs. And if you're buying into this, you're being suckered. I felt really authentic about that because I was willing to do that. People took notice and that business took.

Off. But there's got to be a marketing piece to getting your message out there too. Anybody can be authentic and put YouTube videos up, but there's got to be some behind the scenes strategy of how you're getting that to spread to hundreds of thousands of people, because I know you.

Have. Yeah, well, that really just comes down to execution, Right. It's not necessarily he who has the best product that wins the race. It's he or she who markets the best wins. And so if you've got a great product and a great message, you've got to be able to effectively put that out into the marketplace. And for me, that power has come from spending two years way back when studying copywriting like a madman. Which for me, copywriting is just really the art of persuasive communication and sales. If you can't sell, can't persuasively communicate, you'll never go anywhere. You're just stuck in neutral.

When I get asked, Mike, what's the secret to success? It is. It is sales. You have to learn how to sell. And then that doesn't mean becoming some kind of salesperson that gets on the phone all day. It's finding the methodology of sales that resonates with your particular personality style. You can sell from writing copy, which myself, I'm an intp. From a Myers Briggs standpoint, that's my personality type. I bet you are as well, are.

You? I'm.

Not. I'm a big old E. Okay. Frank Kern is an intp. Evan Paikon is an intp. I was talking to somebody else was an INTP yesterday. And all of us, surprise, surprise, use the same marketing methods to get ourselves out there, which is we really rely on copywriting. Other people like Eric Worre or some of the other big people out there, Marie Forleo, they rely on their personality, getting in front of the camera, selling from stage, whatever it may.

Be. That's me. Plus my good looks and smooth talking.

Voice. Look at Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Gary doesn't write shit from a marketing perspective, copywriting perspective. He sells from in person through his voice, in front of the camera, whatever it may be. That works for Gary. The common thread. All of these individuals have mastered the art of selling and they've done it in a way that is really congruent with their personality style. That's required for every single entrepreneur out there. If you don't acquire that skill set, you're not going.

Anywhere. That is a beautiful frame because I've never heard the distinction of aligning your sales message with how you best distribute it. We just hear copywriting is the answer, or speaking from stage is the answer, because that's how it's marketed. I've never actually thought about aligning it with your personality type. And now that I think about it, the best copywriters that I know are introverts. And I am okay at writing copy, but I hate doing it. But put me on a stage and watch me dance. It's my happy place. And that's where people tend to gravitate towards me. So that's a really interesting reframe. So tell me about the actual distribution strategy, because you've got more than a few people on your list. You've got more than a few people who know who have been affected by Mike Dillard. So what's the strategy that you take in distributing a message? Because nobody is reading copy if nobody's seeing copy. So what's the plan that you put in place to put something out there? You launch Self Made man, and it's in the top of itunes. You put out EVG, you have 6,000 customers from launch. So what's that process look like to idea to conversion, but then getting it out to lots and lots of.

People? Sure. The secret for me is that I try to only do things that I can leverage for years to come. We all have a certain amount of time in our available workday. For me, if I've got that finite amount of time, I'm only going to use it to work on advertising campaigns and or products or marketing funnels that once I do it once, I will be able to leverage that for years to come. If you do that, you will start to stack these assets on top of each other and you'll get the continued benefit from them as your business grows and grows and grows and they just compound. I don't do a lot of social media, like, ever. I might put out one tweet a week. I might put something on Facebook once a week. Again, I just think of Gary out there because he's getting so much attention in the marketplace where he's just the king of social media. But that's again, the difference between our personality styles, where he thrives and lives in that.

Environment. And he's busier than.

Anybody. And the thought of me having to post to any of these platforms like Snapchat five times a day I would just shoot myself. I don't want to do that.

For me, that's my number one focus. If I'm going to dedicate a month to building out a marketing funnel or writing a sales video, whatever it may be, I'm only going to do that if I can use that and make revenue from it or build my audience from it for the next three years. There's a very conscious decision around that process. And the only way to do that as you create these assets to build an audience in a really consistent way and do it fairly quickly is to use paid advertising. That's it. I never post to social media or my blog with the intent of getting any opt ins from that. I'm sure I do, but that's not why I do it. That's not my intent, that's not my goal. I rely 100% on paid traffic and media campaigns to generate my opt ins, build my list and generate revenue. My focus is always to build out a marketing funnel that first pays for itself. So If I'm spending $1,000 a day on ad spend, I want to make at least $1,000 a day back in revenue. At that point, I've got a perpetual traffic and audience building machine that I don't have to do anymore because I'm not running my Facebook campaign that's outsourced to somebody else. This is how I launched Self Made man four months ago. I'll just walk you through the process real quick. If you're going to do paid advertising, you have to have a product that. And if you've only got one product to start with, you want to start with a product that sells for at least 1000 bucks. One to 2000 is ideal. The best way to sell a product at that kind of price point is through a webinar. You're going to need an hour, hour and a half in most cases to really take a complete stranger who's clicked on your Facebook ad. You've compelled to have them register for this webinar. They show up and then they're willing to pull out a credit card and spend 2,000 bucks with you. You've got to have an hour and a half to do that. So webinars work great. So that's what I started with with Self Made man and I launched the podcast and I launched the brand. But if I was going to be able to advertise that and to buy media, I needed a product within that price point. So I spent three months building out a course called List Grow, which is essentially a step by step, super detailed, super extensive course on how I build my types of information based or membership continuity based businesses. It's how I did EVG and how I'm currently building out Self Made Man. So I've been offering that course via a webinar for 1500 bucks for about four months now. I hired a Facebook advertising agency to run the campaigns to that with the explicit instruction to not advertise to anyone in my existing audience. Which you're kind of cutting the cream off the top like the easiest sales possible. But what happens if you do that is they're the easiest sales possible, but they're gone within a month or two. All of the hyper responsive people in your market will respond and then there's not going to be anybody left. And so you get kind of an illusion of success if those are the people that you're going.

After. It's like doing a launch and then just moving on to the next product where you can just launch and launch. You never really have a.

Business. Yeah. So we're like, okay, we're going to go after people who are not in my list at all. So we uploaded my email list, we uploaded my customer database and we excluded all of those people from the campaigns.

And as a result, thankfully, because of the copywriting skill sets that I've acquired over the years, the funnel converts successfully. So we've been spending on average $750 a day in ad spend and we've been making between 3,000 and $5,000 a day in sales revenue. Last month we did $144,000 in revenue just from that one product and we spent 20, $25,000 to make that.

Money. Let me feed this back to you so that I'm understanding this. You're building the business, which is kind of. That revenue is going to be the firepower for spreading the audience as well. So from an implementation standpoint, you are advertising to cold leads and bringing them into a webinar follow up series. And then the audience that is being built by that are also the people who are going and downloading the podcast. And that's how you're developing long term followers, but also monetizing them in order to pay for that build. Am I on the same page with.

You? Yeah. And the important part of this, right, is if I'm essentially reinventing my business now because I, I sold Elevation Group to my business partner like a year and a half ago. So I'm like, okay, what am I going to do here from a business standpoint, and we'll get into the disruption business later. That that process started a year ago, but that's a couple million bucks in prototype development. So how am I going to fund all of this? Pay my rent, pay my team, fund the dev of that product and all of that. And so if you're going to build a product out and it's going to be good, it's going to take you three or four months to do that. And so I needed a product that I could launch within that price point. And that's so critical because I know that if I' got a product that I can sell between ideally one and three grand, there's going to be enough profit in that leftover to fund everything else in the meantime. So while I continue to build out the business model that again, product has been generating revenue for four or five months now, there's enough profit in those margins to fund prototype development, pay all my rent, pay my team, pay my overhead, and then it gives me the space now in the breathing room because that process, sales process, the webinar is completely automated. I haven't touched any part of that business in five months. That's allowed me to create the next piece of the puzzle, which is the Self Made man society that is bringing monthly continuity revenue into the business. It's very similar model to evg, but it's under the Self Made man brand, if you will. And that brings in a much more accessible price point where you can get a 14 day trial to this for a buck. It's the lowest common denominator you can get. It's $47 a month. After that, if you want to join for a year, it's $400 a year for a membership. So that will eventually become the front end in the Facebook advertising model. And list grow will transition from a front end to its natural place as a back end. But what it's done is it's allowed me to have four to six months of development time to create all of this other stuff, to hire a world class design team to pay for the tech team, continue to pay for customer service agents, and continue to fund the prototype development in the hydroponics.

Business. So you've built a cash flow business that funds your disruption company. Exactly, exactly like your cash flow source. And that is going to fund the thing that's going to change the.

World. So here's some really valuable advice that I got from some colleagues of mine and they've all been, they're in a peer group, a mastermind group that I'm a Part of here in Austin, they're all super successful venture backed guys or CEOs themselves or excuse me, entrepreneurs themselves. And they've all been aware of the hydroponics company since day one. And they're like, this is going to be massive. And the dumbest thing you can do is to go raise money and give away equity. So they're like, with an idea that is basically a sure thing because of your audience, because of your skill set, and because of what the idea represents, it is going to be very, very big. And so do whatever you have to do to not raise money and to keep as much equity as you possibly can because it'll be the most expensive money you ever raise in your life. So I took that advice to heart and so I'm like, okay, I'm going to personally fund this entire thing. I've got to create a business that will allow me to do that. The goal over the last year is to put that business in place to where I've got something that's producing 300,000 to $500,000 a month in revenue, which will allow me to fund everything, fund my life, fund my business, fund my administrative costs, and fund the development of the prototypes. This whole thing has really been a bridge to get me to the really big win, ideally in the next 12 months here, which is the launch of the disruption company, which my goal and expectations is in the next three to five years that'll be 100 million to billion dollar business. And so you're building a bridge, man. That's essentially what this process has been.

About. At Freedom Fast Lane Live, Gary Vaynerchuk said something I'll probably never forget because I asked him the question about. I know that 80% of entrepreneurs, or at least those who are sitting in the audience, are in a business that's making money that they loathe the idea of being in for their entire life. And he said, shame on you for not pivoting once the business was profitable to fund something that's much bigger than you. And it was like, oh, it was this big brain gas moment for me where I realized that all that cash flow businesses really exist to do is fund what else you're gonna do with your entrepreneurial spirit. And there is, I guess, the four hour workweek approach. If you want to fill your life with other stuff, that's cool. Cash flow businesses do that well. But if you're an entrepreneur and you want to have a big disruptor company, there has to be a pivot from cash flow to that disruptor company, and so few people make that. So with you, with the ability to manufacture money, you've done it many.

Times. You have a list, you can.

Throw up anything and have it be a million dollar business. When was the time that you said, all right, I'm going to pivot. I'm going to make the move from cash flow to building something.

Unbelievable. You know, I think it's just internal inspiration for me. I found that my businesses run their course in about four to five years, meaning that over the course of four to five years, I've come in, I've solved the problem that I've set out to solve. I've learned as much as I care to learn. I feel like I've delivered as much value as I have to possibly deliver. When those boxes have been checked, you die a little bit inside as an entrepreneur and you're like, my mission is over. At least that's how I feel. And so you start to look around for the next mission, to take on the next problem, to solve the next product to create. Essentially, it's this drive to create. That's what happened to me after evg, when that blew up.

Out of my hands. Essentially, at that point, I had to sit down and think, well, what would my next move be? I had a couple of criteria, which is one, it had to have a massive impact on the mainstream population. It's been really great to have these niche products and niche audiences where you can really make an impact. But I really wanted to build a product like Facebook or Whole Foods or something where this is a mainstream thing used by people, everyday, normal people around the world, not just entrepreneurs. And it had to be a physical product.

That was a unique challenge to me. But I've done the information guru thing for 10 years now. I love it, but at the same time, it's not a challenge to me and there's no exit from.

It.

Right.

I'm kind of tired of doing that. Because when you're the personality and you're the face, you can never leave. And that to me, I'm coming up on 38, coming up on 40. I'm ready to have some kind of exit at this point in my career so that I can take a deep breath, sit back and relax and decide what I want to do to impact the world next, but not have to do the guru thing.

Anymore. I went to school to be a pastor, and God told me that you want to invest in buying the Cleveland Indians itself.

Right? Exactly. Exactly. That was my criteria. It needed to have the potential to impact people around the world. It needed to be aligned with my values on a personal level. When? We'll get to that here in a minute. It couldn't rely on my face or my name. It had to be a physical company that I could eventually sell to people who are much more skilled at scaling those kinds of companies than I am. One of the biggest passions that I've had over the past few years has been health and juicing. Specifically, I used to go to Whole Foods every other day, buy $100 worth of produce, come home and juice that stuff every day. It was super healthy, but it was a pain in the ass and it was ridiculously expensive.

I started to look around all of the industries about a year, year and a half ago, thinking about, well, what am I going to do next? And we've got all kinds of huge companies here in Austin. They've got houses here, but you've got Uber, you've got Airbnb, you've got 99 designs, you've got all of these companies that have come in and decentralized their specific niche or industry. I thought it was really curious that nobody had done that in agriculture yet. Probably the biggest industry on the planet. It's required for every human being in the world to eat every day. And yet nothing has really come in and disrupted that industry since the invention of the steam plow. I thought that was kind of odd. And so I started to look around into that world and obviously the big buzzword over the last 10, 15 years has been hydroponics. We're starting to see commercial hydroponic farms pop up more and more around the world. But I can go out and buy hydroponic bib lettuce at Whole Foods right now and it's still five bucks ahead. It might be really good quality, it might be grown locally, it might not have pesticides on it or stuff, but. But if you're not in the top 5% of the population financially, you still can't afford to buy. Freaking a head of lettuce that doesn't have pesticide residues on it. It's not going to poison you and your family. That, to me, became the problem that I wanted to solve. I was like, I am personally disgusted by the fact that people who are going out every day, the hard working, middle class Americans out there going out every day and going to the grocery store and they're eating at these restaurants that are supplied by the same farms and vendors. And the average bunch of spinach, conventionally grown spinach, has 54 different pesticide residues on it. You're literally eating poison. And it just infuriates me that that's where we're at in America. And so that got me super pumped up. And I'm like, I'm going to go solve this problem. I don't want my kids eating this. And I don't want this to be limited as an option to people who just shop at Whole Foods. So I started to ask myself, well, how do you disrupt the ag industry? It's the same as all of those other businesses. You have to decentralize it and you have to make the starting point and the ending point, and you have to put those in the exact same place, which is your house. It's in your kitchen.

There's been a couple of different products on the market over the last 10 years where people have attempted to do this. Where you can grow your own produce hydroponically in your house. Super poor execution. They're ugly. They're a pain in the ass to use. It's akin to taking care of a fish.

Tank. I'm thinking of the tower.

Gardens. That's one of the primary examples. That's probably the most popular one. I bought one to check it out and tried it and it works. But it's a pain in the ass. You have to go in and you have to check the PH every couple of days. You have to adjust it and put your hand in the tank and swirl all the chemicals around.

You. All my stuff died. I can kill any plant, and this was no.

Exception. It's a good idea for when it was invented 10 years ago. It is for use by people who are passionate about growing plants and they want to actively participate in that process on a daily basis. And so that's not me, that's not you. That's not the middle American family either.

Good concept, but I want to make this easy where anyone can use it, doesn't require any of their time. And you can't kill the plants and it looks beautiful. Like having this in your house becomes a centerpiece. When your kitchen, where people walk in the room and they're just like, crap. That's amazing. What is that.

We started playing around with this about a year, year and a half ago. Started coming up with initial designs and I ended up hiring Whipsaw. He's one of the top three industrial design firms in the country. They do products for Google. They did the Nike Fuel band. They did the Livescribe pen. Kind of a who's who of high technology products. I started conversations with them a year ago. They Loved the idea. Bob, the owner of the company was like, this is brilliant. I'm super passionate about gardening and I want to design this for you. So they took on the project and the prototypes show up in two weeks, the first three after over a year of development, $1 million in.

Funding. Did you know that up front that this was going to be a million dollar.

Prototype? Yeah, I mean you get bids from the industrial design firms and Whipsaws was one of the most reasonable and they've seen stuck to that to a T. They've been.

Amazing. So I gotta ask, what cost a million dollars? Meaning what about the design or.

What about time and hours? Time and hours and you know.

Tooling. It was the team, it was really the.

Team. If you're getting a world class team, you're gonna pay the price, but you're always gonna pay for something one way or another. Either gonna pay a premium price to get it done right or you're going to pay out the nose anyway to fix mistakes down the road. Either way you're not going to save money, you're going to pay it. I'd rather just pay it up front and get it done right the first time.

The prototypes, we had three of them. You've got to order parts, they're one off from your vendors in Asia. And each of these prototypes cost over 20 grand a piece just to get the first set so that we could see it live and in person. So they're 60 grand right there just in prototype costs. And that's just round one. So if we make modifications and order a new set, there's another 60.

Grand. But you knew you were sitting on 100 million or billion dollar.

Idea. Yeah, I know I am. I know I am. I've liquidated my life savings for this. I've divested all of my investments to fund this. This is my primary asset. And I'm literally putting all of my chips all in every chip I have on the table for this. So it'll be the biggest win of my career. Or I mean ideally I have self made man to keep things going, but I will have pushed myself back five years from a financial standpoint and really have to start over from zero. But that's.

Okay. You also have new connections, new ideas, a great story to.

Share. Well, I'm betting on something that I have control and power over, which is myself and my skill set. So for me I'm not really taking any risk at all. It sucks. From a convenience and a financial standpoint, there's risk, there's but I'm in control of that risk. I'm betting on me and my skillset and my track record and I have 100% confidence in my ability to pull that off. So for me, I'm having a fantastic time. This has been an amazing process and it's so awesome to be able to develop a product with a team of amazing people that I don't really have to do anything with on a daily basis. Like we meet once a week on a webinar, they give me an update, I give my feedback and we go from there. And it's just been awesome so far. Obviously that'll change when it's time to launch the.

Product. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that. So the process for getting it underway was you paid for somebody else to do it. You had the idea, you had the concept, you brought it to somebody, you let them do that and you paid for it. The process for launching it, I hallucinate is kind of in your.

Wheelhouse. It's 100% me at this.

Point. Yeah, you're going to use the same strategies that you've built. Everything else, I.

Assume. Well, no, I mean different, because this is a physical product. Right. So I've been studying product launches and crowdfund campaigns over the last year, looking at what works and what doesn't work, trying to find out the teams behind the really successful ones. And so we've definitely put together a game plan. We'll be making the product available when it launches for pre order because with a physical product like this, pre orders are probably going to cost. We're probably going to charge a retail price of around two grand. So pre orders for two grand. I don't know what my unit cost is going to be yet, but it's pretty substantial. There's a lot of costs involved in getting these manufactured, shipped, assembled, distributed, like it's a whole new ball game. But if we were to order pre order units now for immediate delivery upon launch, I'm going to get that wrong. And so that means I'm either going to order too few units and I'm not going to be able to maximize the potential of the launch, or I'm going to go too many and I'm going to take on an incredible amount of debt and risk. We order 20,000 units and we sell 3,000, then that's a bad decision. Either way you lose. The pre order model is really the way to go. And that way you know exactly how many units to manufacture and the customer is the one funding that instead of you the company owner. The dangerous part about that is that you have to keep expectations in check on delivery because once that money's in, you can place the inventory order and it's going to probably take six months by the time it manufactured, shipped, over, assembled, all of that other stuff. And so, and that's boring if there's no problems. And so you can't say, hey, you're going to get your unit in five months and have it end up where there's issues and it comes in 10 or 12 and you waste all of that amazing PR and brand equity that you had built up during the.

Launch. So Amazon FBA is not an option here. There's going to be no two day.

Shipping.

No. But you will be using an audience and a channel to launch it. You'll be doing crowdfunding campaigns which have a tendency to go very, very viral if you're going to solve a major.

Problem. Yeah, we're not going to use Kickstarter, we're not going to use Indigoga, we're going to host it on our own website. But it is going to be a pre order campaign.

That's what the most successful campaigns that I've seen have done with products that cost over 1000 bucks. Because the issue with Kickstarter and Indiegogo is you have the stupid prize piece. Ryan, you'll appreciate this, but your customers and your audience will choose from the options that you give them. When we launch this, I want to give them two options, which is buy or don't buy. If I do this on Kickstarter, you've got five options, you've got give us 10 bucks because you love our mission. Here's $30 and you get a T shirt. Here's 500 bucks, you get this, here's 2,000, you get a unit, here's 5,000, you get a unit and a party or whatever. Now a person's got to sit there and decide between five or six different choices. And you've taken all of that time, money and effort to get their attention to get them to your site. And the easy opt out for them is like, I'm going to go for the $25 prize, which is not helping us or anybody. It's just a giant waste. And so I don't want to have that as a part of the campaign. I want to give you two options, buy unit or don't buy unit and that's.

It. Do you feel like you're still going to be able to generate the same amount of buzz using your own independent.

Channel? Yeah, yeah. It'll get that the channel for me is relevant. We're going to take control of that with our own advertising. So we've already started to strategize and put in place four month long Facebook advertising campaign, YouTube campaign, media, banner ad campaign. We've already started pixeling our audiences and all of that stuff for retargeting. So we're being very conscious and deliberate about how we're going to pull this off, but we're going to do it all ourselves. And it'll get virality and sharing and PR on its own, but there's no advantage to doing it on.

Kickstarter. Indiegogo is part of your strategy of talking about it publicly to set the groundwork for that major launch? I've seen that be successful in a lot of different.

Models. Yeah. I mean, every opportunity that I give to talk about it or mention it, I do, just to kind of plant the seed. My audience. I haven't told anybody the name yet because we're still working on trademark issues and I don't want people to go out and start seoing the name and all of that, that stuff. I'm not going to show anybody anything about it and I'm not going to mention the name until we are full green lighted, ready to go and we're 90 days away from the launch. But at the same time, I'll come on shows like this on my own and talk about the concept to get people curious about it, to build that awareness. We've got tons of people who are in my ecosystem that are like, man, I can't wait to buy one of these. And they haven't even seen it yet. Definitely building that buzz and that foundation is very, very important. Building some strategic partnerships as far as bringing on the right people to the advis, something we've done as well. I've got some amazing, amazing people who are official advisors to this business that are, I mean, I'm just unbelievably grateful that they've come onto this.

Project. You've shared some of the names with me in there. It's an impressive, impressive.

Lineup. Yeah. So having their credibility and their name as a part of this product is a huge piece to it. So again, it's been in the works for a year and a half. It's probably going to end up being two, two and a half year process from start to launch, which is a lot longer than I'm used to in the information product world. So that's been interesting. And so in the meantime, the only risk to this entire thing is to run out of money.

That is the goal in the meantime is to use Self Made man to make a difference, deliver a ton of value so that we can continue to bring in revenue to fund the development of this company and ideally change the world. And if we do our job correctly, we're essentially going to put organic produce and replace their grocery run every single month on their table with no pesticides for 90% less money than they could buy it for at Walmart or their grocery store. You're going to get organic produce at a 90% discount than you could buy it for. We're going to reduce water waste and usage over traditional agriculture by 90 to 95%. We're going to reduce pesticide and chemical use by 100%. We're going to completely eliminate the supply chain from the farm to the warehouses to the grocery store to to the transport trucks and everything in between. The win is huge for everybody. Everybody wins in this scenario. It's pretty exciting.

Stuff. Well, Mike, I'm so impressed with what you've done and thank you for sharing this. As a case study of somebody who's pivoted from that cash flow to a world disrupting company, would you tell us a little about Self Made Man? This is very near and dear to my heart and something that I really believe in what you're doing and I've said publicly. I listen to a handful of podcasts, including yours. Would you share a little bit about Self Made.

Man? Sure. The idea for that was born about two years ago or the inspiration for it again after I left dbg. What am I going to do next? When I've looked out the window at the world over the last 10 years, one of the most alarming and concerning trends that I've seen is the degradation and the value system that really defines America. And that's from Washington on down, where socialism has taken a hold in this country, political correctness has taken a hold. Amen. Victimhood has taken a hold and all of the values that have made this country great have been under attack in a massive way. And if that trend continues, we end up in a. Pardon the language here, but hell, frankly, like a living hell where entrepreneurs are no longer free to create. There's too much red tape and legal stuff to wade through to where we can't do what we want to do. How do you change that? If you look at historically, that's a really big trend to try and change. How do you do it? Well, there's two ways it's been done through the barrel of a gun, or you have to change the value set held by the men who are in society. I don't mean for this to come across sexist or leaving people out or partitioning, but. But that has been a man's role traditionally, since the species has been around. It's to provide and to protect and to lead. And so that's kind of our role. And we've seen men out there today in families, kids who are growing up without fathers. They don't know what a father looks like. They don't know what the difference between right and wrong is. And they're missing all of these qualities. And in another generation or two, this is just going to look like a wasteland unless we start to change that. And so, again, we're not going to do it with the barrel of a gun. The only other option is to change the value set of men that we have in the next generation so that they can make that impact on their children, and we can start to stem the tide here. And the only way to do that is to provide mentors and leadership to men who are out there in the world. And I figured a podcast was the best way to do that. It doesn't rely on me to provide all of that leadership or mentorship on a weekly basis. I get to tap into people like you and others who've been on the show who can really provide their expertise, and then I can provide them with the soapbox or the platform. I can use my skill set to get that message out into the marketplace, and we can start to make a difference, even if it's just a little one. But that really was the goal and the inspiration behind the founding of the.

Show. Basically, what you're saying is that Mike Dillard is going to make America great.

Again.

I will do my best to provide whatever little sliver of support I can in that endeavor, but that's my goal, and we all have to collectively get behind that. We're going to lose control of this entire place, and the freedom that has allowed us the ability to go out and build our businesses is not going to be here in a generation. And it's a pretty scary future for me to.

Consider.

Well, Mike, I believe very strongly that entrepreneurs are the key to changing all of the world's problems and solving all of the world's problems, and that the more entrepreneurs and the more productive entrepreneurs we have, the less we need government, the less problems we have, and the more we uplift everybody. So I say this a lot, but I say this in all sincerity, keep on changing the world. And thanks for hanging out with us here at Freedom Fast.

Lane. Awesome brother. Thanks for having me. It was so much fun and thank you guys for listening and your support of Ryan. So thank you so.

Much.

Mike has encouraged me and inspired me to think bigger this year and he will have the same impact on you in person at Freedom Fast Lane Live this December. And we're bringing in his entire board of advisors to talk about how they plan to make his new hydroponics company a hundred million dollar business. He's going to be talking more about the business and the strategy behind it. We're going to go into what each board member brings to the table, what skill sets they mastered to build on hundred million dollar business. So if you have inspirations to get to that level or to grow from 1 to 10 million or 0 to 1 million, you can't help but up level as a result of listening to this panel. I'm so stoked for to have all of those people at a roundtable. It's going to be spectacular. I imagine that Freedom Fast Lane Live is going to be the highest concentration of value that's ever been put into a three day event. Tickets go on sale at the end of September. If you're a freedomfastlane.com newsletter subscriber, you got an early bird link and that goes away at the end of August. So if you're listening to this after that you can wait until Tickets go on sale at the end of September. I hope you'll join us. This is going to be amazing and I am excited to put it on, but I'm excited to attend. The only way I know how to do this is to build the event that I want to go to. This is the event that makes me a better business person, that makes me grow. And if you listen to Freedom Fast Lane, I know it's gonna force you to grow and uplevel as well. So grab your tickets when they're available@freedomfastlanelive.com I can't wait to see you there. If you found value out of this episode with Mike, please share it with someone who is building or scaling a business or who you know needs to be challenged to go bigger. And if they need to go bigger, then they need to be at Freedom Fast Lane live December 9th, 10th and 11th in Austin, Texas. I'll see you there and I'll chat with you on the next episode.