How To Buy and Build Businesses to Grow Wealth - PLUS Taking Drunk Questions | #FFLTV Ep 16

I was gonna drink coffee on this episode, but instead it's gonna be hard lick hard booze.

Mm. Good thing I'm not driving for a couple hours.

Yes.

Rita, I'll have to drop off some ice for you to drink that properly. There's no proper like drinking scotch neat is the proper way to drink that. Jonathan Wills knows. Did you ever watch Homestar Runner?

Remember Hamsar? Yeah. Hey, wonder mate. I'm Hamsar, the captain of the gravy train.

I feel like I should do this one shirtless.

I got one. This is Ryan Daniel Moran. Hey, who the hell are you? I think I bought this shirt when I was fat. How long till we're live? 30.

Oh, you're rolling right now. Oh boy. You're gonna leave that in, aren't you?

Hey fastlaners, I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. On today's show, we're not drinking scotch. Don't try this at home kids. We're gonna look at how a travel company can sell more gear. We're gonna take live Facebook comments and we're gonna talk about buying businesses to build an empire. Lets go.

So as an entrepreneur, I am always curious to find the commonalities among some of the world's most productive and successful people to find out what are the things that they do in common to provide success. And obviously this is really common right now. Tim Ferriss is really big in finding those common attributes. It's what his book Tools of Titans was all about. And when it comes to wealth creation, when it comes to building empires, it's been my observation that building businesses and investing the profits is the fastest way to generate significant wealth. But that investing the profits piece, from what I can tell, the people who build really big empires are investing into other businesses. When I was young in my career, I had a few cash flowing websites. Websites that made a lot of income that I grew over time. And the first thing that I wanted as soon as I had a business that was cash flowing enough was say how many of these can I acquire and at what price? So I was buying and selling websites early in my career, even while I was in my college dorm room. And I even taught this as a model of buying websites. Cause websites were super profitable and you could get them for very little money. Well, I've kind of graduated from that. I haven't bought and sold websites for several years now. But I have come back to now buying businesses or investing in other businesses, especially businesses that I can impact. Businesses that I can have actually impact their revenue. And I am often surprised at how few entrepreneurs think. Think about this. I will publicly say that I've had the hardest time building the business of Freedom fast lane and capitalism.com because I'm in the way, right? I have to show up to do these videos in order for the business to grow. But by selling physical products or by selling.

Whatever, whatever your product is without your face on it, you can build that as a big legitimate business. So I use this platform as a way for me to talk about the things and spread a message that I wanna spread. But I build my wealth by building and buying other companies. If we look at Warren Buffett, that is how he made his. Warren Buffett doesn't make money being Warren Buffett. Warren Buffet makes his money being a value investor and buying companies. But even on the Freedom Fast Lane Live stage, we have had gary Vaynerchuk in 2015 talk about how he was gonna buy the jets by buying businesses. And most recently at Freedom Fast Lane Live 2016, we had Nathan Latka talk about how he's gonna own the world by buying businesses. And that methodology, that strategy, I think is the way to build really generational wealth. And it's something that I've been focusing on. In my January 2017 income report, I said that I've been part of a recent acquisition of a physical products brand that we plan to grow and keep as a portfolio of brands that will be scaled into the mega millions and eventually buy me, the Cleveland Indians, of course, obviously. And I'll talk about that when all the dust settles and we get everything buttoned up. But that acquisition has been finalized and I'll be happy to share more about that acquisition as it becomes appropriate. But that is the next stage for me as an entrepreneur. And I'm always surprised that more entrepreneurs don't look at buying businesses as a way to get started or to really become a full time entrepreneur. Because it's a lot easier to take something that's already profitable and scale it than it is to build something from scratch. So if you have been watching these videos or you've wanted to be an entrepreneur, if you ever thought about buying a business that's already profitable, the scalability is much faster, the paychecks come in right away, and you don't have to be the person coming up with the idea. And it's my opinion that once you build a business and have some income that you control, the next step is to invest your profits. And right now I think that buying businesses is the best investment that any entrepreneur can make.

Speaking of building Businesses and investing the profits. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about how to do just that. And today we're taking questions live from Facebook. We've been experimenting with this type of a platform. So if you would like to submit questions for when we're taking them live, head over to facebook.com freedomfastlane. Give the page a likey so you'll know when we're going live and we might just take your question on the next show. Kiril asks what business asset has brought in the most profits and I'd say an audience or an email list. For me, it's been an email list. I consider myself a fairly good email copywriter, but anywhere where you control the audience, I think is where most of the profits come in. If we look at a brand like Six Pack Shortcuts, which is a YouTube channel, they sell a bunch of products through their YouTube videos. What is the reason why they sell so much? Cause they have this huge audience and they're good salespeople and they know how to drive that traffic to sales pages. But it started by having a really big responsive audience. So that has been the secret to my success. And in email specifically, I can launch physical products, I can launch info products, I can do workshops. But that that has been the most profitable, both skill set and asset that I have developed. From a skill set perspective, I think the ability to sell is probably the most profitable skill that you could develop, whether it is through copywriting or from stage. The ability to actually cash the check is kind of needed if you're ever going to run a profitable business. So for me, the asset has been the email list, but the skillset has been the ability to sell. And that's one thing that I think every entrepreneur needs to have. Question from Jonathan Wills. As an entrepreneur, your sights are set very high. Do you ever think that you will feel like you have made it? This is a fascinating question because I have actually struggled with this for many years and it's only become recent, recently apparent to me that other people look at me as if I have made it. It has never really occurred to me that maybe I was ahead of most people until most recently. And I would say that I'm getting to the point in my life where I think that I have made it mostly because I'm at that point in terms of income where I can relax a bit and I can have the lifestyle that I want without having to worry about it too much. So because of that, I do sort of feel like I have made it in terms of a financial part of my life. But I don't think I will ever feel like I have completed my career or I am done. Because at this point now, I just wanna play. I just wanna create projects that create value for people and that are fun for me to do because I don't know how to do anything else. So I don't think there is ever a point at which you really feel like you are done. Because every time you have progress, all your brain does is look ahead. You have to actively train your brain to go back and look at your progress. You don't naturally look at that. You naturally look ahead at problems. You don't stop and look back at where you've come from. That comes from intent, that comes from practice. So I don't think you ever feel like you are done. I feel like financially I'm getting to the point where I don't need to worry so much. But in terms of when you're an entrepreneur, it's kind of a calling and I don't think you ever really stop doing that. Larry asks, what is the most meaningful endeavor that I have taken on thus far? This is a tough for me. A tough for me. This is a tough for me. I feel a little vulnerable answering this question because I have for several years both found incredible enjoyment and incredible regret in putting emphasis in freedom fast lane. And that is because.

Building a business around, for better or worse, what is my opinion. And my training is incredibly draining, especially for the amount that I take home from the business. So a lot of times it can feel like I'm spinning my wheels and not really getting anywhere. But at the same time, I get the most love and appreciation from this platform, especially when I speak from stage and I'm able to directly impact someone's business. So it's those moments that I think I've gotten the most fulfillment and have been the most rewarding. But at the same time, it's been the most frustrating business that I've ever built. And I have many times regretted ever caring about a personal brand or trying to scale or sell things under a personal brand. So this is actually really tough for me because it's like the. It's. It's like.

The dysfunctional relationship. It both gives you the most passion and it also is your biggest frustration in life. And sometimes you feel very differently about that. And that is really weird for me to talk about publicly. Cause I don't think I've ever addressed that before. But my own personal brand has been the source of the most Fulfillment and the most burnout and frustration that I've had in the last several years. And.

That'S weird to talk about, but that's the truth of how it is.

Of course, Pam is beating me up for not saying Esther was the most meaningful. Dan Gillespie asked, how did I have to restructure my work world when Esther came into the world? Esther is my, wow, almost two year old daughter now. And before she was born I worked all the time. I would work early in the morning, late at night, middle of the afternoon and I really had full control over my day. Right now I don't have so much of that luxury. So as I record this, this morning I was behind on work, so I woke up early and had to knock out some work because that was how I did things in college, right? I had to wake up early in order to get things done and that's kind of how I have to do things now. I have a lot more early mornings and a lot less late nights than I used to when I was not a father. So a lot of my productive work gets done early in the morning. And so I have a lot more early mornings. I'm usually up around 6 or 6:30 in order to either have my morning routine or to be able to get some meaningful work done. Whereas before I might have slept till 9, 10 o' clock and been in bed a lot later. So I worked a lot more more at night before. Now I work more in the morning or shut off more at a reasonable hour. And I have also just had to be more intentional about when I schedule things getting done. So I break things into am I buffering or am I focusing? Meaning am I preparing or am I executing? And I have to really respect those boundaries or otherwise I just go completely crazy.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and we analyze what they're doing well and how they could make more money. Today's submission is from Andy Smetana. He owns a brand called Taste Drink Go. You're gonna see the confusion look on my face and I'll explain why in a second. But they sell travel gear to backpackers and with the intention of inspiring people to travel the world. So they're currently selling between 10,000 and $20,000 per month, both on Amazon and their own web store. And they wanna know, how do we make the pivot from seeking an opportunity to building a brand? Now first let's address the confusion that is on my face because Andy, I'm a little bit confused as to what the name of your business means in the context of inspiring people to travel. So I would recommend that you be very obvious about that in your branding and in your marketing message. Because even as an entrepreneur, I'm looking at this going, I don't really get the brand right off the bat. So that pivot from you're just putting products out there to having a brand, I bet that somewhere in there you had a drink product that you're now trying to pivot into a travel company and the name of it didn't quite go through with it. Assuming that I'm correct about that, I would leave the taste drink, go name for a specific product and create a brand name that houses all of those products. And that's how you could make that transition from just having a specific product with a specific name that you just put up there because you wanted to make some money, you wanted to take some sales, and. And now you're trying to build something bigger out of it. That's how you can play that dance, have the big brand name and then the little product name for that product and any other products that you want to assign a name to. Now, how are we going to grow this business? You specifically, I think, are sitting an opportunity that not a lot of people have access to, and that is that there are all of these different travel blogs, travel podcasts with individuals who have huge audiences, but they have no idea how to monetize that audience. The travel niche specifically is kind of is kind of notorious for having big followings that don't make any money. So you have really cool, cheap traffic that is passionate and loves to get behind brands, but they don't have a lot of things that are catered directly to them. You, you are. So you're in a really sweet niche because you've got people who will want to buy into what it is that you're selling, but the traffic is really cheap to get in front of them. There are podcasts with huge followings that do interviews. Go on there and promote your products. You'll need some sort of an info hook, like, what's the reason somebody is putting a travel entrepreneur onto their podcast? You need to be able to address that question. There are blogs especially like these points blogs. They're all travelers. They're all people who are traveling on the cheap. So what's your hook? How do you get there to provide guest content, blog content, be interviewed by them, do a feature on their website? What's the reason why they're featuring you on that website and featuring your products. There are YouTube channels all about this. And if you don't want to do the interviews yourself, you can just advertise to those specific audiences. There are Facebook groups, there are YouTube channels that will all serve as great foundations of your marketing, foundations of the paid traffic that you will advertise to. And you'll put your marketing message right in front of them to be able to build that audience and sell your products to them. So my recommendation is for you to keep selling these products, do the traditional Amazon stuff that most people associate my strategies with, but at the same time go out to where all these audiences are because it's really cheap traffic, especially in your niche. And if you do that one, two punch of leveraging Amazon as a channel while also going out and getting all of this cheap traffic, I think you'll have no problem turning this from a one trick pony into a big brand. One of the things, there's the scotch kicking in.

One of the interesting things about being an entrepreneur is that it is a very interesting point portal into self development. Entrepreneurship basically makes you bury your soul because it is the time that you are directly responsible for the results that you get in life. You don't get the results if you don't provide the value. That's why entrepreneurship really cuts us to the core of who we are. It's why I think entrepreneurship is one of the greatest ways to change the world. Because it forces us to provide value. It, it forces us because we don't get rewarded if we don't provide value. But also I believe it makes us better people because we have to learn how to provide value. We have to take responsibility for the results that we get in the world. That's a story that I don't think gets told very often, is what it does to the individual and how it makes you a better person. Because basically you have to peel back your ego and deliver value. Because if you are putting on a facade, you eventually get found out. Which is why a lot of the scammy Internet marketers deal with an incredible amount of imposter syndrome. And they have this flashy life but they're not really happy. So entrepreneurship I think is one of the fastest ways, the fastest gateways into personal development. And it is also I think why people resist entrepreneurship. Because it's scary. Not because it's any harder or riskier than working a job, because.

Exposes you, it makes you who you are if you're ready to start that journey. It's what we do here. We inspire entrepreneurs, we help people start businesses. So if you're ready to take that first step, we take people from not even having an idea to having a product up and selling within 90 days inside of our brand builder Bootcamp, which is@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp or if you have a business that already is selling but you need retail partners, investors, you need ways to scale, you want to grow faster. You want to be a part of a community and in your local area of people who are building and growing businesses. You belong in our tribe. That's@freedomfastlane.com tribe. I believe it's our mission to create as many entrepreneurs as possible because it's inevitable anyway. We're all going to have to take responsibility for our lives because the 9 to 5 is a dinosaur and entrepreneurship is the path forward. And it is how we create a better world. Thanks for being part of that change. We'll see you on the next show.

Sam.