How to Bring a Bankrupt Business Back To Life

I'm buying back. I'm buying back. Unique New York. The human torch was denied a bank loan. The arsonist has oddly shaped feet. Boy, serious time. It's time for business. It's business time. In 2017, I sold business for $15 million. I'm kind of a big deal. Hit the subscribe button because I'm very important. That's pretty good. I think we should run that as an ad.

So this week I met with my team to discuss discuss the turnaround plan for the company that I am buying. And we crafted the plan for how we're gonna turn it around, rise it like a phoenix from the frickin ashes and bring it back to a $10 million business. Back to a $10 million business? Yes, because that's what it was at its peak. How do I know? Because I started the company in 2013 and then in 2017, I sold the company for $15 million. I didn't get all of that money because I had some equity that I held back. And then the company that bought it went bankrupt. They bankrupted a really, really healthy, profitable, awesome company because they did it wrong. But anyway, in this video, I'm going to share how my team and I are going to implement really some very basic things and rise us like the Phoenix from the fricking Ashes and take this piece of crap company back to a $10 million business.

The company had to go wrong somewhere, right? To go from a $10 million run rate, which was what it was when we sold the company all the way down to now about a $1 million run rate, a 90% drop in a few years. What had to happen? What went wrong? Well, what went wrong is that the people who owned it stopped marketing to customers and they started just launching products. It was one of the things that I noticed as soon as I was out of the operations and no longer an owner in the company, it was is that the people who owned it just started launching product after product after product that had nothing to do with the target audience. If you follow my work, you've heard me say it's all about the audience. It's all about the person. They got away from the clear target customer that we had marketed to for years. They started chasing opportunities rather than doubling down on a person. So the first step for turning his company back into a $10 million business is, is to go back to the target customer. Now, the interesting thing is, is since there is no clear target customer for this company, it's called sheer strength, by the way. It's a supplement company that looks like crap if you look it up. The branding is terrible, the audience is terrible, the products. Products aren't terrible, but they're marketed terrible. Products are actually really good. They're just marketed terribly. So don't judge me based on what the other private equity groups did. Okay, we're going to fix all of this. I'm going to document it here on the channel, so make sure you're subscribed so you can see me turn this whole thing around into a $10 million business again and then beyond. Anyway, since there is no clear target audience, we can pick a new one. Because when I launched the company in 2013, I was this skinny hard gainer wannabe bro, not so skinny anymore. So 6 out of 10. Anyway, I'm not a skinny wannabe bruh anymore. I don't wanna be that dude at the gym. I kinda actually do. Still. Part of me still wants to be that guy.

But I'm a dad now.

I've got two kids. My goals have changed, my lifestyle has changed. I care way more about being a fit, fit 50 year old then I care about being the biggest dude in the room. I always tell my students and followers, target someone you care about. Build the business around a customer that you're excited to serve. And in a lot of cases, the person is you, the target audience is you. And that's what we're going to do. With sheer strength, we're going to make the target audience us, me again. Middle aged dads who are still trying to get to the gym, still trying to be fit, running companies or being high achievers and still being active with their kids. So our messaging in sheer strength moving forward is really going to be about going from dad bod to father figure. And that is going to be our messaging and our marketing as we create a sphere of products that we will be launching. So if you've read my book, that book, if you listen to my content, you've heard me say this over and over again about building the audience first, picking the group of people that you want to serve first. And at sheer strength, we will be targeting dads. Dads on a fitness journey, the dad bod to the father figure. And when you know that transformation, when you know that journey, then you can start to go through the product list that will make it easier for dads to go on that fitness transformation. And in your business, it's so important to think about what the transformation that your customer is making and what products you can introduce to them when they're going through that transformation explain something.

The second step of the transformation to $10 million is to create the product line that excites the customer base and helps them on their journey. Now, right now, the company has like 14 or 15 products in its product line, and almost none of them are the ones that we created when we built the business. The product line that we took to $10 million basically doesn't exist anymore. There's maybe two products that still exist, so there's 14 or 15 that they just launched over and over again trying to find something that would work. And we're going to cut most of them. We're going to pare it down to about the core six that make up the bulk of of its sales and cut everything else. With those six remaining products, we'll have a business that does between $900,001.2 million ish in sales. And that'll be the foundation from which we launch everything else. Now, here's the thing that will surprise so many of you. The product line that we are launching next does not make sense. If you look at it in jungle Scout or Helium 10 or, or Google Trends, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't meet the criteria that most business owners are looking for when they're launching products. Is there a market for it and are other companies selling this? Well, no. Again, if you follow my content, you know, I don't believe in that. I don't believe in looking at what's working for everybody else and trying to copy it. Instead, I'm looking for emerging trends. I'm looking for what's in best service to the customer, even if they don't know that they need it yet. I'm looking for new solutions to the problems that that customer is facing on their journey. So when you see us launch products, you'll probably be like, I didn't know that was a thing, or I didn't know that there was a market for that, because there's not. Instead, we're launching the products that we have conviction about. Here's why. Conviction creates markets, not the other way around. If you have a product that you absolutely believe in and you look at the other person and you say, I know that this is what you need right now. You persuade other people, other people believe you because you believe it. Conviction is what creates demand. And we're creating a product line that I can look at someone and say, I you need this. You should buy this. This will make your life better. And when you can look someone in the eye with that amount of conviction, you can run advertising, you can run webinars, you can sponsor influencers with a confidence that you don't have when you're just trying to compete with everybody else to buy your thing over somebody else's thing. But because I have conviction about this product line and and can look someone in the eye and say you should buy this thing and you should pay a premium for it, that in my opinion is more powerful than data. Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm wrong and the product line doesn't hit in the marketplace and we fail, I would rather fail believing 100% in every single thing that I do than build a company I wasn't excited about, that I didn't believe in and that I didn't think was in best service to the target market that we're serving.

The third piece of the strategy that we outlined was a way to get customers and build the audience. And because we have a very clear target market, we know exactly who we're going after and how to get in front of them. So the first thing that we're going to be doing is is partnering with a few target influencers that give us credibility and exposure to audiences, people who look exactly like our target market, that have authority in that market and can help us spread the message about product launches, about the differentiators in the product and any resources that will help build our audience. That's step one. Step two is building the audience ourselves. And the way that we are going to do that is in a couple of ways. One, I do plan on having a book written probably called From Dad Bod to Father Figure and I'll partner with a doctor on that in order to give it credibility and use his resources and his knowledge in order to make the book actually viable. And so that will be a book that gets customers that will run a book funnel to it will build up a buyer's list, we'll build up an audience and we'll have upsells for our programs or our products at sheer strength that will also give us a launch list to save sell other products to. The second thing that we'll be doing is running media traffic, Facebook, YouTube search. We'll be running traffic to an email opt in. An email opt in that warms up customers to our products. I still do not understand to this day why more e commerce entrepreneurs do not buy advertising to an email list and warm up the subscriber list to sell their products. Whether they're on Amazon or Shopify. Most people are just looking at Facebook ad to conversion or ranking on Amazon. They're missing 80% of the volume that's out there. We're not. We're going to run cold advertising to email captures, and we're going to build a giant email list to launch our products to. This isn't rocket science. Those three things alone will bring it back to a $10 million business. I'm pretty darn confident about that. We'll have a very target audience. We will have products that are amazing and will run cold advertising profitably. And we'll build an audience to launch more products, too. Not that hard, not that complicated. We're going to do it, and you can follow along. And I'm going to document the building of this business back to $10 million. And this is just phase one. I just want to see the thing exist. I just want to do it for the joy of doing it and seeing it. And that's how I know this is going to work. Because if I was all tense and balled up about it, which I was at first, because I'm like, what are people going to think of me if I fail? I built this company once publicly, and if it fails, if somebody hasn't.

If somebody watches me fail and they think something of me, what? So what if I fail? If I succeed, I'm the same person. If I fail, I'm the same person. So who gives a shit? All of this to say in your business. Do you have conviction about what you're doing? If not, can you find something that you have conviction about? Can you change the way that you show up in that business so that you have conviction? Your customers will respond to you differently, the marketplace will respond to you differently, Investors will respond to you differently if you're showing up with conviction. But if you are playing this game because you're trying to get the money out of it, you'll show up without the level of intensity that you'll show up with. If you're just doing this because you want to see it created. And I would invite you to consider that as you go through the next chapter of your business. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran. Hit the subscribe button and follow along as I bring this company from the ashes from a piece of trash company back up to being a leader in its industry. Thanks for watching. See you next time.