Lessons Learned Building & Selling A $6M Brand w/ Drs. Travis & Jenna Zigler

Hey, capitalists. Did you miss the 2021 capitalism conference in Austin? That's all right. There's a talk we've been dying to share with you. Doctors Travis and Jenna Zigler have been in our orbit for years, attending our events, coming to capitalism.com mastermind groups, and workshop events for years now. And it's been amazing to watch their success. In this talk from Capcon5, they share everything they've learned along the way, building up and exiting their brand. Let's dive in.

I'm proud to introduce the next presentation to you. Proud in the sense of I have worked alongside Travis and Jenna for four years. Five years. Five years. And when we met, they were just at the very beginning of their journey, looking at basically what we're talking about. Like, well, when we get to that point, then we'll consider pushing the gas. When we get to this level, then we'll think about starting that foundation. When we get to this point, then we think we'll start traveling. And it was all that. That headspace that all of us are so familiar with. And we watched their transition over the last several years to go from what was an okay idea, something that was doing okay, to completely repositioning the business and finally breaking out, becoming a multimillion dollar business, having a multimillion dollar exit, and partnering with a team that is. Is growing it even faster than they were doing on their own. And so the missing piece in the lineup, after solidifying all of the headline speakers was the actual team that were practitioners in manufacturing the breakout of going from an okay business to breaking out into the high seven figures and then having a financially rewarding exit. And both of them are fantastic teachers and very good at diving into exactly how they made that pivot. So I feel proud as somebody who's been rooting from the sidelines to introduce to you Travis and Jenna Zigler.

Hi, everybody.

All right, well, I want to first start out by just expressing my gratitude for Ryan, number one, for inviting me to this event. And then you guys all being here. This is pretty great. And, you know, this is our first time speaking on stage in ever, so this is like our first time getting up here. I decided. Thank you.

I actually decided to start speaking on stages about two years ago, and something hit like Covid or something and kind of blew that out of the water. So I've done a lot of virtual stages, so this is great being up here. But today we're going over seven lessons learned. Seven. I don't know why I said seven, but lessons Learned building, taking our struggling side hustle and building it into a multimillion dollar business and then selling it for a financially freeing exit. And we're going to talk about what financially freeing to each of you is going to be. And my goal is not to give you a bunch of to dos, but I am going to kind of put on some tactics that you might help simplify your business a little bit more and give you more headspace. And so that's kind of the goal of this talk. I want to briefly just cover who we are. We're both doctors. We're actually eye doctors. And we started practicing a little while ago. We'll go into the story a little bit more. We founded a company called ilove. We did 4 million in 2020. We're projected to do about 6 to 7 million this year. And we exited in June. And we got really creative with our exit. So we're still running the company for the next three years as well. I'm also the CEO of profitable Pineapple Ads Agency, hence the Pineapples. And we do a lot of remission work down in Jamaica. So that's pineapple too. Even though they have more coconuts than pineapples. Pineapples are just more fun.

Yeah. So, you know, our passion is really helping others, and that's just in general. So we love being up here helping all of you and talking to all of you. We love helping dry eye sufferers in our business. And so that's really where our passion lies. And you're going to hear a little bit more about that as we go through our story. And then our superpower, you know, is really, it's audience building. So we've done a lot of audience building for.

I love.

And then of course, Amazon PPC is what Travis, that's really his superpower.

And that's pretty much. That was our business, is we built an audience and we did Amazon ppc and we did that really well. And that's all we focused on. And when we focused on everything else, that's when things got hard. That's when my to do list was too long. But now it's, I don't. I don't work much anymore. It's pretty great. Don't tell that to my boss. So we're going to take you through a brief timeline of just our life because it does apply to every lesson that we have. And we're going to relate that lesson back to our life in some way. And so we're going to go all the way back to 2010. And that is us getting our doctorates. And our goal in life was to make $100,000 a year. And that was like the creme de la creme. That's what we thought we were going for. And when you get out of optometry school, you only make like 60 to 70,000 a year, if you didn't know that. And I realized that the only way I could make $100,000 a year was if I worked 70 hours a week. And I did it. And so there we were. We were both working 70 hours a week. I was working from 7:30am to 5:30pm she was working 10:00am to 7:00pm so you can imagine we never saw each other. And it was miserable. We weren't happy. We were in Ohio. And then we learned. We'll talk about this in lesson number one, that the fastest way to freedom is owning your own business. And once that birdie gets implanted into an entrepreneur, it just never goes away. Right? That's what, like, all of you guys are here for.

So, you know, marrying him, I never realized the entrepreneur that Travis was until about 2013, 2014. And that's when everything changed for us. So we really did three things that you're not supposed to do all at the same time. So we quit our jobs as optometrists, working for his uncle and another doctor. We moved across the country and we started three new businesses. So we moved from Ohio to South Carolina to start two new optometry businesses, and then we ended up starting Ilove at the same time, just mostly because we were bored or Travis was bored.

Yeah. And I was even employed by my uncle. So I didn't have a bad job. It was a great job, great opportunity, but it just wasn't fulfilling. And so when we moved, I went from actually seeing six patients an hour to one because we had a brand new practice. So I was bored out of my mind. And that's when we started the online business. And that's kind of what set up the whole. The whole business online. So then in 2016, we met this guy. You guys know him a little bit, maybe. And he taught us serve a person instead of selling pieces of plastic. Essentially, it's kind of the whole motto is serve a person. And so we were selling sunglasses. We were a sunglass brand. We still sell sunglasses. We sold blue lockers, and then we sold reading glasses. But that wasn't fulfilling. We weren't serving a person. And then we switched to a dry eye brand. And that's when everything really took off, is when we started serving that individual person, that dry eye sufferer.

Yeah. So in 2017, here we are. This is a great picture of Travis. This is his last day working as an optometrist, actually. We were running this $2 million company while also practicing full time, both of us. And I found out I was pregnant and it was like, okay, we can't do everything anymore. Something's got to give. And so we decided to retire from practicing. It was probably one of the hardest things that I've ever decided to do, just because we were going into the unknown. And that, to me, was terrifying. But we went full on into I love and never looked back, which was one of the best things we've ever done. 2017 was also a really hard year. You know, we ran out of money. We had about $100,000 worth of sunglasses. Stack stuck in customs for months. So we had to reorder all of that inventory to be in stock for peak season. It was just disastrous. We were also in a large lawsuit with a pharmaceutical company, which is never any fun. So 2017 was really. It was a tough year, but it was an exciting year because we really got to start over almost.

Yeah. And then moving on to 2019. This is our son. That pretty much sums up 2019. It was a tough year and it was filled with the lowest of lows. And I hope that none of you experience anything that we experienced in 27 or 2019. We suffered our biggest loss in life. We about sold this business for nothing. And then we also suffered our biggest loss financially. And then we actually ended up moving from South Carolina back to Ohio during that time. And we realized that was a big mistake and Austin drew us in. So then we finally moved here in January of 2020, and then here we are today.

Yeah. So today 2021, we go on two to three eye care mission trips a year. You know, Covid aside, hopefully we'll get back into the that we exited our business in June for multi seven figures. And we'll talk a little bit more about that moving forward. We are staying on for three more years with this company. This company is really. It's a great chance for our brand to get into way more hands than could ever be possible with just us. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. And then we also. He runs an Amazon PPPC agency with two of his best friends, so that's pretty fun.

Yeah. So we're going to go over our five biggest lessons learned from masterminds, conferences, books and more. And you don't understand the power that you guys are sitting in. If this is your first conference you've ever been to, congratulations. You probably picked one of the best ones. But there are people around here that will invest in your company. There are people that if you have money, you can invest with them. And there are people that, if you want to run their Amazon agency or you want to run their Amazon business for you, there are. You can come talk to me. Don't talk to Brett, don't talk to Jeff. Come talk to me. I'm just kidding. They're great guys, too. So there's somebody in this room to take you to that next level. So don't be afraid to talk to everybody, because this is where the magic happens, is the table that you're sitting at. It's not the people on stage you'll learn, you'll get your to do list, but it's the people that you're surrounding yourself with right now. It's the dinners, it's the drinks. That's where you're going to make the magic. So I hope we can inspire you. But the relationships is where the magic really happens in these rooms.

Yeah. So we're gonna go through five secrets today. The first one is the true path to freedom and finding that for you. The second one is what is your why? You know, really dialing in that why in your business is going to get you through a lot of adversity that could come your way. Secret number three is finding the customer that you want to serve and then going out and serving them and giving them what they want. Secret number four is how to scale beyond $1 million. And then secret number five is how much profit do you have? And really figuring out how much profit you have in your business and then being able to know what to do with that.

Yeah. And if we have time, we'll do some bonus ones, too. So. So how many of you guys read over 50 books a year? Raise your hand. Anybody? Yeah, over 50. So I love it when people, like, are always bragging about how many books they read. And I do. I'd read, like, 50 books a year. But one key thing that I do, and I don't think a lot of people do this, is I read the same books over every January, and I use a different colored highlighter if it's a paperback, or I'll listen to it in, like, a audible form or like Kindle or I'll do both audible and read it at the same time. Because then you get both at the same time, and it Helps you memorize it even more. And so I always encourage you that if you have books and it makes an impact on you, to read it every single year and implement it. Don't just read them. Don't just consume. Implement. And so we're going to go through a couple books and a couple ideas that we've got and that I read every single year. So the first one is secret number one. So the true path to freedom. I'm sure you guys will all get this, because this is like the book for entrepreneurs, but has anybody seen this before? Yeah. Yeah. Cash flow quadrant. So this is our life in a nutshell, and this is what we're all inspiring to be is that B and I category. And so when we were working in Columbus, Ohio, we were working for my uncle and working for another doctor, and that was the E category. I traded my time for dollars. I learned that if I worked 70 hours per week, I'd make $100,000 a year, but if I worked 40 hours a week, I'd make $60,000 a year. It just didn't compute to me. So you have no leverage at all? No leverage. So then we moved to South Carolina, and we bought our practices. So we owned the job instead of had a job, but it's still the same thing. We made more money. We went from making 200,000 a year combined to now making 300,000 a year combined, but we still own the job. And so when we were there, we made money. When we weren't there, we didn't make money. But then Ilove came into the picture, and that's our online business. So we realized that we couldn't.

What we did is we woke up in the morning, we worked on Ilove, we went to practice, then we came home and worked on it. What we realized is we couldn't leverage ourselves anymore. So we made our first hires. So then we started moving into that B category where we're building this team out. We started out with a couple Filipinos, and then we started building an American team, and now we just have a strictly American team. Now, nothing against Filipino vas or anything, but we just found an American team for our dry eye space. Just. It resonated better. And then we are leveraging people. So right now we could take a week off. And the agency runs fine because we have a great team. And I love runs fine because we have a great team. Will it grow? I don't know. Yeah, I think it would, but we just don't know for sure. And then once we had our Exit, we started investing in it, so now we're moving into the category where money works for us. So has anybody not read Rich Dad, Poor Dad? Raise your hand. You have not. All right, you're getting a copy.

I remember seeing this quadrant for the first time and being blown away. Like, literally, I went to school for eight years to be an optometrist, and I'm still in the E category. Like, that almost made me mad, but it lit a fire in me to do something different with my life, and that's where I love came in and everything that we've done in the last five or six years.

So action items, really remember why you started this in the first place. So I know this doesn't seem like it goes with the cash flow quadrant at all, but it really does. So did you start this for, you know, did you start it for extra money? Did you start it for the freedom that this business is going to give you? Did you start it for the impact? You know, I think at first we started for the money. We wanted 1,000 extra dollars a month to. To be able to go on icare mission trips. And it became so much more as we moved into, you know, focusing on impact. And so remember why you started the business in the first place. And then write that down on your mirror so that you see it every single day. You put your. Why put your vision on your mirror so that you're looking at it every day?

Yeah. We have a vision board of each of us on our mirror, and the Jamaican flag is right in the middle of it because that's where we do most of our mission work is in Jamaica. Every October, we go there, and then we had our debt, our student loan debt on there until June of this year. And now the student loan debt is off the mirror. So exciting moment of our life.

Rich dad, poor dad.

There you go. Yeah. So secret number two is what is your why? So this is one of my favorite lessons and one of my favorite books. So we had a mentor that told us that you're either going into a storm, you're in a storm, or you're coming out of one.

He is in a permanent storm for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, yes. But aside from that, if you think about the things that have happened in your life, both personally and in business, you can think about those times when, okay, I was going into a storm and I didn't know it, or I was definitely in a storm, or I'm finally coming out of one. And the reason that I say that to you is because it is so important to know your why. Why you do what you do. Because it's something that you can focus on in times of adversity. And so our why is basically we believe that everyone deserves great vision. So 1 billion people in this world are functionally blind because they don't have access to glasses and proper eye care. And so we take the profits from our company to provide health care for people that cannot afford it and cannot access it. Jamaica and the US Are the main places that we do this, but it could really be anywhere. So we're going to show you a little video here about. It's basically one of our mission trips. It's one of. It's our why.

So you guys kind of get the idea of what that is. And that's pretty much what our clinics look like. There's usually we serve about 2 to 3,000 people a week and we give them glasses and it creates a whole economy and that it just builds up the Jamaican economy or wherever we are. And I just want to tell a brief story about this. We were. We've celebrated 12 years of doing that now and we're in the. We go to Sandals Resorts. Sandals foundation helps put us up. And one of the managers at the Sandals Resort comes in and he's a 25 year old. He leads this Sandals Resort. And he said because you guys came to my village when I was 12 years old, I was in trouble all the time. I was into drugs and then you guys gave me glasses and I excelled in school after that. So that's the impact that we have when we go to these little villages because these people can't afford eye care. Eye care in Jamaica is almost more expensive than it is here in the US and so we give people hope by giving them glasses. So that's kind of our why we started that impact back in 2006 when we went on our first mission trip. And that's when everything changed in our lives.

Yeah. So, you know, it's important to know your why and to have that why and focus on it. It's also important to have a vision for your company and where you want it to go.

And.

And so in I love we know that we want to help a million dry eye sufferers. We want to help them heal their dry eyes naturally. And we believe we can do this by, well, get to it by 2030. So, you know, this is really, this is what we focus on in I love and it's so important to put this vision into. Out into the world. Really. You don't want to keep it to yourself. You want people to know what you're working towards. So.

Go to the next one. Yeah. So in addition to having your, you know, your vision for your company, there are a couple things that you want to focus on. So you want to focus on how you do this. So you want to focus on the products that you sell. We focus on our community as well. So our Facebook community is about 16,000 people, the dry eye syndrome support community. And it's been a huge asset to everything that we've built. We talk about our foundation, so our private foundation, where, you know, all of our profits go into and helps fund these mission trips. We talk about the team that we have and how that team is an asset to our business. We talk about our communication with the customer, how we talk to the customer, and then marketing as well, and how we're going to market to people and bring more people into our ecosystem.

So then on top of the how we also get, we get personal in the mission. So we want you to feel like you can relate to us. And when people meet us in real life from our community, they feel like they know us. They ask us about our kids. And I do the same thing in our agency side too. I have a YouTube channel on there and people come up to me at these events and they're just like, how is so and so. And it's just like, how do you know that? And it's just like, oh, I watch your channel all the time. And so getting personal with your vision of your company is going to help people get alongside you along with the mission. And so our three kids are our inspiration. And I know that sounds cheesy, but each kid has done something that's inspired us to change our life in some way. And it starts with our oldest, Jude. Jude actually started out. We were told we couldn't have kids. And we tried everything under the Western medicine sun except for ivf. We were told that just flat. They just said, you can't have kids. If you try IVF, you have a 10% chance. And we're like, well, the day of our IVF appointment, I pretty much said, we're not doing this. Let's explore other options. So we went the Eastern medicine route and we were pregnant in three months. So three years in Western medicine, three months Eastern medicine. We're western medicine trained doctors, so you can imagine what this did to our belief and it shook us to our core. And so I'm practicing seeing these patients and I'm like, I don't even believe what I'm doing anymore, because I can teach somebody instead of giving them an eye drop for dry eye, I can teach them a healthy lifestyle and exercising and stressing less and doing little tiny things that can make a huge difference. So we started putting people through. We wrote a book called Rethinking Dry Eye Treatment. It's all about that journey that we went on. And then we have a bootcamp called the Dry Eye Bootcamp Challenge. It's absolutely free, and it teaches people natural living, and it's simple stuff. It's like, drink more water. And we've sent thousands, if not tens of thousands of people through this with amazing results. We have. There's an OSDI score. It's an ocular Surface Disease index. It's just what they use in dry eye studies. Our boot camp is more effective than almost any prescription drop out there. And so it's just a change in mindset. So Jude was the inspiration behind that. It was just kind of like, wait, if we got pregnant in three months from Eastern medicine, how can we not do this to dry eye? And so we did, and it changed our whole business trajectory as a result.

It shows that you can find inspiration anywhere, really.

And then Bodhi is our son that we unfortunately lost in 2019. That was kind of that lowest of low. He had trisomy 18 Edwards syndrome. Most of you guys have probably never heard of it because it's just a little bit more severe form of down syndrome. They usually don't live past the age nine. And so we lost him in 2019. And 2019 was a tough year. That was when we about sold our business. Then we lost Bodie. We lost our entire life savings to that point to a bad investment. And there was just a lot coming down on us. And I remember talking to Ryan, and we were in our car, and Ryan was on the phone, and he like, kind of talked us through everything that we were going through. We were running six businesses at the time, and he's just like, just get rid of everything you don't want to do anymore. Just get rid of it. And so we did. We just stopped four businesses just right there. We made a choice that night and focused on the agency. And I love. And the amazing thing is everything took off from there. So Bode is our constant reminder. Don't focus on anything that you're not passionate about.

Yeah, do it.

Life is way too short. And we witnessed it. We held him and let him go. So it was the hardest thing we've ever had to do. But it's a constant reminder as well. And then Silas is here as a result and he's six months old and right over there.

And then our core values. So still on the vision part and you want to talk about how you're going to get there, get personal with it and then we're going to do core values. So why are you here? What do you live for? And everything that you. Every choice you make. You can go back to this core value set and you can copy mine if you want. I don't think I made these. I think, I think I copied these too. But every decision we do is based on this. So integrity first. Make sure you're doing what is right even when no one is looking. That's kind of key. Integrity is everything in this business. Service before self. Make sure you're taking care of the customer, the patient, the other person on the other side. Before ever thinking selfish thoughts about yourself. Focusing on that impact instead of that freedom and money. Freedom and money is more of a selfish thing. It's great, trust me, it's great. But impact is where you really get free. That's the key. And then excellence in all we do. Don't do anything half assed. I mean, make a good product, come out with great products. Don't just come out with something. Just to come out with something. And then finally people over profits. If the person asks for a refund, just give it to them. You're going to get a lot more of a headache if you don't give it to them and push back on that. So just always focus on the person that's on the other side. Imagine if you're trying to return something and they're giving you crap back. It's not fun. So make sure you're focusing on the person and not just the profits of your business. So does anybody not have a vision for their company?

Everybody's got a vision in here. It's okay to raise your hand. I mean, we didn't forever.

All right.

So why? You know, we're going to talk about really, you might wonder why. You need a why. And really we talked about it a little bit already. Adversity is going to come your way. We've had a ton of things happen in our business and in our personal life. And if we didn't have a why to focus on, we wouldn't be standing on this stage right now. We wouldn't be in the position that we're in. So, you know, having so much money stuck in inventory lawsuit with Big Pharma. We have had failed product launch after failed product launch. And finally we had one product that hit really, really well.

25Th product.

Yeah, it was about our 25th product. You know, we invested a ton in Shopify in 2019 and just lost a ton of money. We lost our son. You know, all of those things are things that can happen, and if you don't have a why, then you're never going to be able to get through it and come out better on the other side.

And that's the importance of having that team built out. Because when something like losing your son happens or losing everything, you don't want to. You don't even think, you don't even want to do anything. And having that team in place to come up and lift you up and support you is just. It's huge. So I do have a book for this one, too. So if you would like help writing your.

Why has anyone not read Vivid Vision? Anybody that wants it can come get it.

Yeah, anybody. Yeah, you got it.

So your action items for this are to write up your vivid vision and then post it for the world to see. So don't keep it to yourself. Put it on your website. Ours is on our website. We share it with all of our customers, all of our wholesale adopters.

And then, yeah, we saw him speak in 2016 or 17 on this stage, and that was very. Changed our business forever. So secret number three is find the customers you want to serve. Now, we moved to South Carolina to start a new practice, and we wanted to do pediatrics. We loved kids. We thought that's what we were destined to do. And so we're like, we're going to start this pediatric practice. It's going to be great. And then all we saw were elderly African American women. And I was just like, okay, this isn't what we had planned. And unfortunately, in the area that we lived in, that was a lot of glaucoma, a lot of diabetes, and a lot of dry eye. And so it shifted our pediatric focus to then be a dry eye focus. So we became this dry eye practice just by happenstance. But we ended up loving it. Because when you can solve dry eye for somebody, a lot of you guys probably don't have it in this room. But if you can solve it, it's mostly postmenopausal females. But when you solve it for somebody, it's a game changer. They can get back to their life. They can drive again, they can read again. And so it's so beneficial and it hooks you. Once you have a dry eye sufferer that you've. I mean, we've done tens of thousands now, and it never gets old to get the testimonials. And I remember we were selling all these products on. On our. On stage, we were selling all these products off our shelf, and they're like eyelid wipes, eyelid cleansers, eye drops. And I was at the Tribe Summit in 2017, and Dr. Stephen Cabral was on stage and getting drilled by Ryan and a bunch of panelists, and they're like, you're the expert. Why are you selling other people's products and not your own? And I was just like, oh, my gosh, light bulb moment went off. And I was like, that's it. Everything on that shelf is going to be our brand by the end of the year. It took, like, five years, but no more like three years. But it took a little longer than we thought. So then we decided to start really focusing on building up this Dry eye side of our business. So we started a Facebook group.

Riches are in the niches, right?

Riches are in the niches, yes. So, Facebook group for dry eye. And this is the last time I poke fun at Ryan for this, but Ryan said, that is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. And I was just like, I don't know. I think. I think there's something there. So we just started it, and there's nobody in it. And we went live every single week, and nobody showed up. Nobody showed up. Nobody asked questions, but we were in there live and just engaging with ourselves, essentially. And after six months to a year, Facebook started showing us at the top of the search results. So if you go to Facebook, type in Dry eyes. We're the top one. And so people were just joining it organically, and then they started suggesting it to people. And so now we're up to 16,000 dry eye sufferers, naturally, organically, and we.

Really don't do anything, much of anything anymore. It's all, you know, everybody that's in there is providing the content for us. So they're not allowed to me this. And with our sale, we can't really do anything anymore, but everybody's already in there. It's running itself, essentially.

So here's the value of a group. The group you can ask questions to. I loved what she said. What was it? Tushy is. Yeah, dot, dot, dot. Like, I was like, that's genius. Like, you can get what your group's about. You can get ideas. So whenever we're going to come out with a new product, we ask them first. What would you guys need most? And the funny thing is, somebody came in one day, and this is actually to our practice, not came into the Facebook group, but somebody came into our practice one day and was like, this spray that you've been prescribing for me called Avinova is $300 a month. Now, it went from $30 a month to $300 a month. And she goes, you're the entrepreneur. Fix this. And I was like, okay, I'll see what I can do. So I started looking up manufacturers, and I found one. Got on the phone with him three days later. Never done private label before, but he said, yeah, let's give it a chance. His product is the most superior product on the market. We've done testing all over of every single product in our category, and our product is the most superior because this manufacturer has a patented process. And it was the birth of our hero product, that 25th product that finally hit it big, that we're now selling 200 sales a day of, and it continues to increase to this day. And that's. That's a picture of it. And all you do is spray down your eyelids. That's it. And it's highly effective. But it was all because our customer or our competitor raised their prices, and I listened to my customer, and that was it. So raising that or getting that audience, they're going to tell you what to come out with next. It's really super simple. So the action for this one is find the customer that you want to serve, go to where they are, and then serve them. Now, does anybody know, like, anybody that talks about this, like, a lot? No.

Yeah, Ryan definitely does.

So I still read this book every single January, even though it's only been out a year. There's a YouTube video.

So there's a YouTube video that is exactly his book presented on stage. I used to listen to it, like, every single month because it is that inspirational. And it made me focus on 25 products, or, excuse me, four products selling 25 a day at $30 price point. And it's so simple. But we get distracted by all this other stuff. And when you just focus back in on that, your business will take off. So I actually have. Has anybody not read this book?

Has anyone not read this book?

You can admit it. He's not watching.

Okay.

He's like, somewhere over there. So we have a special version of this book because he said he's only signed a handful of them. And you're going to get an autographed copy. You can come up Nope, she's got it. Yeah. You.

Me.

Yeah. Yellow, come on up.

I feel lucky.

Yeah. You raised your hand first. So there you go.

There you go. You might be in trouble by Ryan later on, but so just to kind of. Actually, I'm going to skip this because just for time's sake, just so we can get through everything. Yep. So secret number four is how to scale to 1 million in beyond. So the hardest thing is scaling to a million. Learning to sell is one of the hardest things. I mean, how many of you guys are under a million? It's okay to admit that I was under a million for a while. Yeah, it's okay. This is the hardest part, but also the most fun part. You're in the grind. The grind is the most fun. If you ask any of these people that have sold for eight, nine, seven figures, like, the grind right at the beginning was, like, the most fun. I know you're back in it and you're having fun in it again. So. But see, the previous secret. Go back to number three. That is how you sell. You serve somebody, and then sales just come naturally. That's all you have to worry about is serving somebody and learning to sell. Once you have it down, it's easy to replicate it. Yeah.

As you can see, repeat the sales process over and over and over and over again with different products. You know, keep coming out with things that are working, you know, and listen to your customer.

Yeah. And just repeat.

All right, so the next thing to do to scale beyond $1 million is to hire for a specific purpose. So don't just hire anyone. When we started hiring for a specific purpose, then that's when our business really took off, and it really gave us the freedom to not be in our business so much all the time. So if we needed a customer service manager, we went out and hired her. We hired somebody to manage all of our wholesale doctors and all of our market. And then don't just hire them, but have key performance indicators for them that they need to meet every week, every month, know what numbers they need to hit, make sure they know the numbers that they need to hit. And that's going to help your business excel.

Yeah. And just having very few numbers really helps with that. Purchasing another brand is actually huge. So we were managing somebody inside the agency, and it was an eye care brand, had different products than we sold, so it wasn't a conflict of interest. And they were on a yo yo, so they kept running out of cash. So we'd order a bunch of inventory because we were scaling up. And then we'd run out of cash for marketing, so we'd fall back down. So we were going up to up to 100,000amonth, back down to 30, up to 50, down to 40. And it was just this constant roller coaster. And so we saw the opportunity there and we bought them with zero money down. We gave them equity into Ilove, took over all their products, infused them with cash, got them up to 150,000amonth by just making them stable. And now I think they're doing 200,000amonth or something like that. We're getting ready to roll out even more products for that category. But it was in our space. Some products competed, but it just needed some cash. So find another brand in your niche that might be struggling, because when you're scaling, you need cash, and it's that simple. And that's why we've got two SBA loans as a result of that. And then focus on what got you there in the first place. Don't get distracted. There's so many things that you can be doing for your business, but when you focus on what got you there in the first place, where you've learned how to sell, stick with it. We got distracted and went from. We started focusing on Shopify because we wanted to diversify in case Amazon suspended us. Amazon has suspended us. They've suspended 40 of our products. It happens. And it's not that bad. It's really not that bad. But we focused on Shopify one year and we had no profit that year.

Yeah, I mean, we took our focus off of what we do best, and our. You know, our business started tanking. And there's a slide here that shows in 2019 how our revenue dropped when we focused on Shopify. And then the next year, we took it back, fired that person that was helping us out with that, and we refocused back on Amazon. Amazon grew, Shopify grew. Everything grew.

And we weren't focusing on Shopify anymore. And it grew.

Exactly. Yeah.

So 2019 was, ironically, also, Ryan's gonna love this, the year that we actually left the back room. So we were in the back room from 2016, and we're still in it now. And 2019 was the only year we left the back room and we joined another mastermind. And it was just funny because it's just coincidentally or not coincidentally, not really. Ryan's good with mindset.

All right. And then the last way that we have, I believe it's the last way to scale beyond a million dollars and even past $10 million. And beyond is to make a strategic sale to a competitor to expand your distribution. So that's exactly what we did when we sold in June. So in 2020, I believe we made the Inc. 5000 list. And during that time, we were getting so many emails from different people that were interested in purchasing Ilove and we really came up with terms for what we wanted, what we wanted to sell for. We wanted to still be a part of the business, at least for a couple years. We're the face of the business, so it's our baby. And we weren't ready to give it up yet, but we knew exactly what we wanted. And so Travis just had what, an email template that he would send back to everyone. And so many people we never heard from again. But there were two that came back and said, sure, we can probably make that deal work. And so we talked to both of them. Ultimately ended up going with a company that has a ton of doctor distribution. So they are direct to doctors, and that's something that we are weak in. And so now we have a whole doctor network that we can bring our products to. So that's incredibly exciting moving forward. And it's really going to help expand our brand.

Yeah, they have multi thousands of doctors that they're in and we're in 60. So big difference. We're a direct consumer Amazon brand and they don't do any of that. So we're taking over all that for them. And there are seven brands and growing portfolio. And then they're taking on the wholesale side, which is like a big headache off our plate. But the strategic side of we wanted to stay on. And so we're staying on for another three years and we're going to have more payouts in the future. We actually got our second payout yesterday, which was like a surprise. It was just like, hey, here's a second payout. Because we sold a little bit. And I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, we'll take that.

So your action items are to replicate the sales process that got you to where you are. So you have a book for this, right?

I do. Has anybody read Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson? Has anybody not read it? Yeah. Yeah, you want it? Yeah, she wants it. So come on. This talks about going from 0 to 11 to 10, 10 to 50, and 50 to 100. So if you have. This was actually gifted by Ryan to me like five years ago. And that's not my book. You don't want my book. It's filled with highlights and everything.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

And then secret number five is how much profit do you have? So we've already talked about how our business has struggled in the past with money and having enough money to move forward.

We've almost, you know, run out of money two times. But the thing that really, I believe that saved our business as far as money goes is following a profit first money management system. And so we switched our business in 2019, I believe, to a profit first money management. And it's basically the envelope model, if you've ever read anything by Dave Ramsey. And the envelope model says, you know, you get all your money into one bank account. We used our Amazon bank account because that was the easiest one, whatever was tied to Amazon, every two weeks. And then we distribute it out into these envelopes which are bank accounts. And it's really been, it's been a turning point for our business. We have.

Helps you make strategic decisions on everything you're doing.

Exactly. So profit first, you take your profit first. So the goal, as you see up here, the goals are to the right. The goal is what, 10% profit? I believe you start at 1%, you don't start at 15% or 10% and then you move up from there. But the idea is that if you take your profit first, then it's going to. Oh, you can't see.

There you go.

If you take your profit first, then it's just going to snowball from there. So he can kind of walk you through kind of how we do it.

But yeah, so it comes into the main bank account every single two weeks. And then we literally have all of these bank accounts. So profit first, like she was talking about. We were at 6% when we sold. We didn't even get close to 15%. 4% for owner's comp. That's paying yourself. That may start out at 1% too. And that's okay. Tax man. Don't forget the tax man. Don't ever, don't ever go into that account. Taxes that account. You want it. Because then when you get that fifty thousand, hundred thousand, six hundred thousand dollars bill, it's there and you just write it and you don't fret it, it's just there and you already planned for it. Finally, the two key ones are the opex, the operating expense and the inventory one. The inventory one is not discussed in the book that I'll give away here soon. But the inventory one is something that was very helpful for us. We separated out how much we were spending in inventory because whenever that inventory became excess, so we had more than we needed in that inventory account. That's when we released a new product. But we never released a new product unless we had more money than we needed in that inventory account. Because you don't want to. You don't want to hinder the products that you have if you can't support the products that you have. So always focus on the products that you have and building those up. And then, of course, if you want to do charity, that's our charity. If you want to donate to us. But I love Karis foundation, and we always donated 1% to that as well. So where it's yellow, our credit cards are over our OpEx. And so we have to look at marketing, we have to look at how much we're paying our team, we have to look at bonuses, we have to look at everything and figure out why we're not hitting our number. And so when that happens, figure it out and you can diagnose it instead of waiting till the end of the year and be like, where'd all my cash go?

Yeah, that's pretty common. Your action item for this is to switch your business to a Profit first money management system. So if you haven't read Profit first, somebody can come up here and get a copy.

Yeah. And if you haven't read Mike Michalowicz's books, they're fantastic.

And we only have, like.

So we got six minutes left, so we're gonna go speed round. That was the five. So we have a couple bonuses that we put on here. We have six minutes, so we're gonna try to squeeze through them. The bonus is know what you need and why. This is just knowing your number. I always ask, like, what do you want to sell for? I want to sell for 10 million. I want to sell for 100 million. Why? Why do you want to sell for that much? And you never. Nobody ever has a good answer. But if you have it, that's great. So this is like an exercise that we did, and it's from a book as well, and it's called the Financial Dreams Calculator. And essentially, in dream number one, you're covering your basic needs. So what do you need for your home mortgage, your utilities, your food, your transportation, your savings and insurance, and then your total amount that you need per month. And so if you guys want the spreadsheet, email me at the end.

And this is passive income. This is what you want to be making in passive income so that you don't have to be, you know, working to fund your lifestyle, basically.

So, yeah, you figure out what you're paying now and what you need. Passively making 10%. Ish. Just to be conservative, to hit that number every year. And then you have your dream scenario on the right. And so this is just your basic necessities. Yes, we save a lot of money, savings and insurance. If you've never done cash flow banking, it's one of the best things you can do. Go talk to Sam Prentice. I think he does it, so. But cash flow banking, it's huge. We've been doing it for eight years now, and it's built up our emergency fund personally. And no creditors can touch it. Nobody can sue you to touch it as well. And then after you figure that out, you come on to the next step and you have some indulgence.

Get a little more extravagant.

I bought these pants, and they were $150. I've never spent over $100 on a piece of clothing, except for a suit in my life. And so I was like, I'm going to buy a pair of pants after we sold. And they're fantastic. They're Lululemon, if you were wondering. Seriously, women know what's up because they're. They're great pants. So then we're going to spend a little bit more on dining and entertainment and small indulgences, and we total that up with the one above it, and that gets us our next dream number, which is 3.3 million invested. Making 10% will get us to that $336,000 a year. But then you want to go a little further, you got to have a little fun, right? And so we put a $3 million lake house on here, Same kind of concept. You add it up, figure out the number, and then we have our travel the world 4,000amonth, and our first class fights of 2,000amonth. And then clinic in Jamaica. You can put your private jet, you can put your Lamborghini, you can put your Ferrari. The point is to dream big.

Yeah. And when Travis first made me do. He asked me to do this exercise. I'm like, you're crazy. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Like, I don't spend money. So I just. It felt really extravagant and really dumb to me. But it was. It was like, okay, now I know that all of these dreams aren't necessarily that expensive. You know, I now know what we need to be able to do what we want to do with our life. And it doesn't have to be material things. You'll see a clinic in Jamaica on there, that's a sustainable clinic. So we can train people in Jamaica to give eye exams. And, you know, we know how much that's going to cost.

So, yeah, our number. And this is our spreadsheet. This is 6.6 million. So that's what we needed. So we could guide, we could take that and think about our exit and what we wanted to exit for to get us to that number and figure out a strategic way to structure that to get us to that number in the future as well. So find your number. And this is from a book called Money the Master the Game by Tony Robbins. I don't agree with everything in this book, but the dream financial calculator. So you've been waiting, so you've been patient. Have you read this? Oh, man.

See, it's the only one. Go for it.

So just some couple items while we have three minutes left about after the sale. Just kind of some things to think about. Eliminate automate, Delegate. This is what you should live your life by. Eliminate automate, Delegate. You guys have that to do list right now. That's really long. Eliminate it. Eliminate half of it. Eliminate things that aren't going to move your business forward as much as the other things. So every time I make a decision in my business or I'm doing something in my business, I always think, can I eliminate this? And if I can't eliminate because it's a vital function to our business, I then see if I can automate it with software. And then if I can't automate it with software, I delegate it to a team member. So an example of this is our parent company calls me yesterday morning. I'm preparing for this, and they're like, hey, we need a slide deck for a presentation we're giving. When do you need it by end of day. And I'm just like, what you need a slide deck presentation on our whole brand by the end of the day. So I literally, like, voice message my team, this is what I need. This is what I need to buy. And they all came together, built the slide deck for me, and I went on a hike with Brian. When we were on our hike, I got back from the hike and it was done. I was like, this is fantastic. And so eliminate automate, delegate. Always be thinking about how you can do that.

You want me to go over Cash is King? Yeah. So Cash is king. So we talked about profit first and how you don't want to run out of money for this. I'm going to play devil's advocate and go the other Way too. So now that we're on the other side and we don't really have capital constraints because we have a parent company that makes a lot of EBITDA and they have cash that they can infuse us and they're just like, as long as you're making profit, hit the accelerator. And now that I have that cash at hand, we were able to increase our marketing budget by 30%. We're able to come out with six new products over the next year and really hammer them hard as far as advertising is concerned. And that's because we have the cash. So I've never been a big fan of investors, but it's pretty nice if you have a lot of cash in your corner because you can really push your brand hard. So find somebody in here to talk about investing in your brand because it can really help you out.

The thing I have for you is more of a logistical thing. Make sure you have your ducks in a row as far as regulatory things go. So if you're selling supplements, look at any claims that you're making. If you need FDA registrations, make sure all of those are in place so that you don't have to worry about it after you sell.

Well, we already talked about the terms of it.

Yeah.

Number one piece of advice is be persistent. Show up every single day, do what needs to be done to push your business forward, and don't get distracted. That is the key thing.

Yeah. Know why you do what you do? It's going to get you through anything that can come come your way.

And then I kind of said this before, but do what makes you happy. Go talk to the people that have sold for nine figures, eight figures, 10 figures, whatever it is, and I guarantee they'll talk about the grind and how the grind is the most fun. Yeah, we just sold, but I love the grind. That's why I started the agency, because we're in the grind all over again. We're in that 0 to 1 million stage. So do what makes you happy in your business. Enjoy the process. Right now, it is hard, but trust me when I say that you will make through as long as you're persistent and as long as you're happy doing it, people will come beside you as a result of that.

Look at that.

There you go. If you have any questions, you can email us. Come find us afterwards. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Give it up for the doctors, the good doctors.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you one you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits you can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.