Making 6-Figures From Dog Poop, Inequality & Women's Rights, AND Dealing w/ Failure | #FFLTV Ep 11

Here, I'm gonna put this stick in Cleveland. Indian sticky note. I mean, just hang it on there. Is that the first one you used? Yeah, we got it on camera. What?

What's up, fastlanders? I'm Ryan. Daniel Moran. Today we'll talk about inequality and human rights. We'll talk about regret and how to move past it. We'll look at some entrepreneurial failures and. And we'll look at a six figure business about picking up dog poop. Fancy catchphrase.

So how do we not talk about the protests and the marches that are happening around the country and around the world now? This has been all over the news. We've been talking around water coolers and this has been the talk, the talk of the town, right? How do we not talk about this? Overall, I think that peaceful protest is one of our responsibilities in protecting a free society. When we see the government acting in ways that we don't approve of, it is our right and our responsibility to say something, to do something, and to organize. So hats off to those of you who were at protests and marches and did so peacefully. That is part of the beauty of the world that we live in. There is a danger, though, that I fear we are starting to move the conversation in a way that encourages the government to serve as a bully pulpit. For example, one of the rights or one of the problems that has been brought up.

In light of recent events would be something like income inequality among genders. There is a push for both genders to be guaranteed equal pay. So we all agree that discrimination is a bad thing, and then we should avoid it, right? We all think that we want people to be treated fairly and have equal protection under the law. That's what social justice is about. We should all strive for that. But there is a danger in expecting the government to go in and by force mandate people to comply with something that you might think is a good idea. For example, today more women are in college and getting college degrees than men. Women's incomes are increasing at a faster rate than men's as a result of us not being a manufacturing economy anymore. Women are having more executive experience and they're having more upward mobility. As a capitalist, as an entrepreneur, I think it's a good idea to hire lots of women because they're better at us at a lot of things. So when we look at that data and we see that it's really only in the past 30 years that we have moved more towards an intellectual economy rather than a manufacturing economy, and we see women's wages going up at a faster rate and more education. There is no reason for the government to come in and by force try to mandate equality among among pay. That is happening already. It's happening in the marketplace. It is because of freedom and entrepreneurship and capitalism that that is happening. My fear is that the government coming in and acting as a bully pulpit and saying this is the way it has to be will actually cause more division and discrimination than if they stayed out of it in the first place. For example, to keep the argument consistent, if the government comes in and says, you have to have equal pay, well, from a business owner's perspective, that business owner could say, I want to hire this person, but the skill set isn't there yet, so I'm just not going to hire them at all. Rather than coming up with a different arrangement with that individual that hurts the people that we're trying to help in the first place. So many legislations, many regulations are made with good intent, but they hurt those that they are expected to help. Furthermore, it causes division because when you isolate rights as women's rights or immigrant rights or gay rights, and you call out a people group, that causes resentment among those who are not in that group or those who just have a different opinion. Look, it is our job to be able to move the conversation in the direction that that you feel is best, not go to the government and expect them to serve as a bully pulpit for legislating morality. That's not the best way that we come together. We come together through peaceful protest. We come together through healthy conversation. We don't do it by asking politicians who are out of touch to try and make our opinion the law of the land. The best thing that we can do to drive equality is to increase the amount of freedom that we enjoy. When it comes to financial freedom, I believe the best way to do that is to start a business and invest the profits. And you can do that whether you are gay, straight, male, female, immigrant, non immigrant, and everything else. So let's look at some questions that'll help you do exactly that.

YouTube commenter pinch and Squeal asks, would you please talk about your failures in.

This world of social media where everybody is just putting up what's great in their lives? I actually really appreciated this question. This came as a comment in YouTube where someone was saying, you have all these successes. What about the failures? Oh boy, I've got quite a few of them. Look, I actually say that in my life, if I was a baseball player, my batting average as an entrepreneur wouldn't look so good. I probably have a batting average of about 250, which means that about 25% of the entrepreneurial ideas really bear fruit. But the ones that do do amazingly well. I don't talk about the things that we're experimenting with that don't work so well. Maybe I should. Maybe it would just humanize the entrepreneurial experience a little bit more. I think the most failures that come up regularly is as an entrepreneur. I sometimes have workaholic tendencies. So as the result of working 12, 16 hour days, grinding my way to success, I think the biggest failure that comes up for me right now in the totality of my life is the fact that I have a really hard time disconnecting. And I have to force myself not to check email, not to check Facebook, not to check Slack, so that I can actually decompress because I will fill in the time void with work. And what that ends up doing is I see all the problems and then I need to fix them all and then I get exhausted and then there's no more creativity. But I have learned in the last couple of years that the more structure that I can give myself to actually free up time, that recharges the batteries and allows me to be creative and productive. But I have projects that have been failures too. I've never talked about this publicly, but the cat scratchers that are so famous in my most watched video was run by Esther's mom and she decided she wanted to be a full time mom and didn't want to build that into a big brand. And so we shut that down. So that wasn't some big success. It served a little purpose, but it wasn't so much of a success that we shut it down. And we could have kept like beating our head against the wall trying to build a business or a brand that neither one of us cared about that much. But we chose not to and so we let the meow mommy go. I've also been very public that I have invested in and started tech companies. It didn't go so well. That's not my skill set. I don't need it to be my skill set. So I had a business called my Timeline which was basically a way to archive your life. We've talked about that here on the show in past and like a week after we went live with that, Facebook came out with Timeline and just crushed, crushed that little business. And I had like 50 grand and that that was lost. I would even like. I've had several investments, six figure investments. Like I doled out cash and the business didn't go anywhere and there went my six figure investment.

I own a restaurant in Avon, Ohio called Fresh Planet that when compared to a lot of my Internet businesses, the numbers on that pale.

They don't look nearly as good as if I had just like bought a cash flowing website or bought an e commerce business or put it into real estate. That basically keeps the lights on, has a little bit left over and serves as a tax write off at the end of the year. I love going there when I'm in Ohio, but that wasn't a blistering success either. One thing that I have learned in the midst of failure, two things. Failure is like the perfect time to reflect upon what's working and not what's not working and what you would do differently. And I find that on the other side of failure usually comes your best successes because you learn a very important principle of being more intentional in the next opportunity that comes up. And specifically, what I have learned from, from a lot of really investment failures is never to deviate from what your best skill set or what your greatest interests are. For example, I always thought I wanted to be a big time real estate investor. I'm probably never going to be the guy that buys thousand unit apartment buildings. Let's leave that for the experts. And I might invest in you if you come to me with a stellar deal. Where I'm really strong is Internet companies, physical product brands double down where you are strong. That's where you will have the greatest return on your time, the greatest return on your investment and also position you in the best chance for success. I can't even say success. It chokes me up. So when I bring that up to say that I have always failed when I've tried to do something that I am not good at doing. That's what I've learned from failure. And I've been able to mitigate that by learning what I'm really good at and focusing there. Also, it's important for us to examine what exactly is failure. We all have this loose idea of what success is. But reach into your pocket and show me success. Heck, reach into your pocket and show me freedom. There is no universal definition of what these things are. It's a rule in your brain. If I do X, Y and Z, I am a success. If I do xyz, I am a, I am a failure. But we're mostly unconscious about what these rules are in reality. Like failure in a business would be like we're out on the streets, right, and can't eat. Like we live in modern day society, which means it's actually really hard to fail because A, you got closer to your goal or B, you learned something which makes it easier for you to do it next time.

That's the reality of things. So let's be gentle in how we judge our results. Success is it success if we're closer to the ultimate goal. By the way, if you hit your goal, you feel exactly the same once you get there. So let's celebrate progress rather than perfection. What is failure? Is it that we don't feel any different? Like we still haven't made it? Because if that's the case, we can have all the success in the world and still feel like a failure. So if we have a loose idea or actually a really defined idea of what success looks like and what failure looks like, we can more properly adjust and also judge our own goals and our progress. But all we can hope for is progress in life as measured from where we came from. Because there is. When we get to our goals there, it's almost never that we feel any differently than how we were before. So achieving the goal and not having fulfillment, that's the ultimate failure. Because then we're just kicking fulfillment further and further down the road and we could be successful, but inside feel like a failure. So what is failure? It's hard to fail if you look at it as getting closer to what you want or learning something which once again gets you closer to where you want to be.

Carl Knight asks, do you have any regrets? And if so, how do you deal with them?

Okay, I'm a nerd and I watch Survivor. I've never missed an episode of Survivor in my entire life. 32 seasons of Survivor, I think, and I've never missed an episode ever. And I'm always shocked when people are voted off and they say in their final words, no regrets. Who in the world does not have regrets? Like, if you fail at something, of course you have regrets. The idea of getting to the end of your life with no regrets, that does make sense to me because I have regrets and I can't do anything about them. Like, I can't go back in time and fix them. So, yes, of course I have regrets. I have regrets around where I went to school and what I started off studying. I went to college to be a pastor. I am clearly not a pastor. This would be a very different show if I was a pastor. That would be interesting. There we go. Preview of an upcoming episode. Anyway, I have regrets. I have regrets around people I dated. I have regrets around business Decisions I made. I have regrets around businesses that I started. I have regrets around things I didn't do that I'm only now getting to. Yes, who in the world does not have regrets? People who have really low standards, that's who doesn't have regrets. The great question you asked as a follow up was what do you do about them? And like most things, I think Dan Sullivan probably has the most insightful way to view this and he simply says if you can look at your life as though everything up into this point has been research and development, R and D, that frees you up to make the best decisions moving forward. Everything up until this point has simply led you to where you are. And that is when all decision is made in the now based on your previous experience. Look, you did not get to choose who your parents were. You did not get to choose where you were born. You did not get to choose your natural health. You have a set of cards that you have been dealt in the same way. Your past experiences, your regrets, your successes, all of that are cards that you currently have. Play the best hand that you have. If everything up to this point has been research and development, you are free to make the best with the cards that you've got. That is the same across the board among all people. We all are operating with the set of experiences and the opportunities that are in front of us. That a is a super freeing thought and and a it eliminates all judgment. I love the quote from the Great Gatsby that says the minute that you wanna judge someone, just remember that they didn't have the same set of opportunities as you did. Look, we would not berate someone else for the regrets in their past. So let's treat ourselves in the same way that we would expect to treat others.

This is the part of the show where we look at one of our students businesses and exam and where they could be making more money and where their best opportunities are. Today we're looking at Tough Mutt. This is a submission from the tribe. And Tough Mutt sells products for pets. Their website is toughmutt.net and they have most of their sales coming from Amazon.com owner's name is Nathan Kolba. Hey Nathan, what's going on man? And they're also on Walmart.com and Jet.com so a couple things. Nathan, your branding is awesome. Love the logo. Your website is spot on. You've done a great job. I love the header at the top that tells a little bit about the story of Chester. I love that. Can I Say, humanizing the dogganizing approach to that. You see what I did there? Anyway, I'm not a funny person. So I think your branding has been great. I think the overall personality of the brand is great. Your reviews are really solid now. Tough mutt right now is doing between 40 and $50,000 a month in sales, which is a great start. The question is, we're kind of at this point where we've hit a moderate amount of success. What do we need to do now? So great, you've got to this point where you're profitable, you're selling a good amount of products. I am going to touch on what you said in your submission about your audience. Your audience is less than 2,000 people on your Facebook page. You're looking at only about 114 likes. So what do we do about this? Two things. One, we have figured out the process to take a product and to get it profitable, selling quickly and have a lot of solid reviews. We need to double down on that process. Since you're not at the million dollar mark, you need to be at about 81 some thousand dollars to be at that million dollar mark. Double down on what's got you to this point. That means releasing as many products as you can comfortably handle. Two more will probably give you the infusion that you need to be able to get at or near that million dollar mark. Everything changes when you're at that million dollar mark. You're open to more investment opportunities, you have more customers, you're taken more seriously as a brand, you have more profit margins so you can do more to advertise. So we need to sprint to that 80,000amonth. You're going to get there by releasing probably two more products. The second thing that we can do to both accelerate that process and start to set us up for larger and wider success is to start building that audience specifically on Facebook or an email list or both. So you are in a highly visual, highly emotional industry and that's pets. We all love ours, some of us a little bit too obsessively. So what that means is we can very easily get people talking and communicating around our brand by highlighting people's pets, showing the products in use, having a contest with our customers to send pictures of them actually using the product and then sharing that on Instagram, sharing that on Facebook. That's viral gold. People love that stuff. They love to be participating in that process. So start engaging an audience. Your cost per audience member will be super low because you can target people who own golden retrievers, who own every type of dog or just dog lovers. I would go more specific just to keep the cost down. But that amount of targeting is possible and the clicks are really cheap. So you can get a bunch of really high quality traffic that is exactly for your market and we can get them rallying around a conversation, showing, doing contests and showing the products being used. This will get people talking about your brand and give you an audience to launch further products to for you to do discounts and giveaways to, and to also just increase the overall interest in your brand. If you do that, you'll solidify yourself against Amazon changes, you'll give yourself a pool of potential buyers to buy the next product and you will have more repeat customers and engaged people who find out about your products, which will get you closer and closer to that 80k mark and that million dollar business. Hey, we're in uncertain times right now and plenty of people feel uneasy or unsure about what the future holds and what direction we're going as a global community and what this means for entrepreneurship and also in our personal lives. Look, we're all in this together. We're all building the plane as it flies. Rather than argue about things that don't really matter on Facebook, let's take a moment to listen to one another, to be supportive of one another, and ultimately to realize that we all want the same things. We all want people to be healthy, wealthy, safe. And as a result, we're really not all that different at the end of the day. And if we approach debates or healthy conversations with that as the context, maybe, just maybe, we can have legitimate conversations about how to best get there. It's my belief that more freedom is almost always the answer, that giving individuals more choice and more opportunity is always a good idea and always a faster, more efficient and better way to move toward the world that we all want to have and enjoy. So that is why I believe that entrepreneurship matters, why capitalism matters, and why it's the best shot at building the world that we want. Thank you for watching and supporting the show. We'll see you guys on the next episode. It.