Multi-Million Dollar Case Studies (You Are Closer Than You Think)

In this video, I'm going to share with you why what you are building right now as an entrepreneur is way bigger than you realize. This is the snack shelf in our office closet. And I tend to learn best by example. So what I want to do is I want to walk you through a couple examples that are just sitting on my shelf. And there's probably some case studies and some examples sitting on your shelf in your home or office as well, of brands and physical products that weren't supposed to work out that ultimately ended up changing a whole bunch of lives, both the founders lives. But it's not just that one thing that I like to remind people, I like to remind our students that what they're building doesn't affect just them or even their communities, their families and generations and the wealth they're building. But there's more people in the total ladder that are going to be affected by your success as well. For example, look down here. This is one of the brands that I started and I sold. I've sold a couple of businesses both to private equity groups. And private equity groups are groups that raise money from investors. The investors want a return on their dollars. The private equity group needs companies to buy so that they can grow them and hire more people. And as the entrepreneur, I want to sell a piece of my business and take home a chunk of money and, and also see my business grow even more. So at all points of the ladder, there are investors who need return on their money that are depending on entrepreneurs to create things in the marketplace. That's you. It's weird to think about that, that your business could infect investors and big groups, but it can. It happens more than you think. And on the private equity side, there's people buying businesses that need more deal flow, so they buy companies like the ones that I have built. And then there's things like employees and customers. And what I'm going to show you next is all the companies that I've been impacted by as a customer. But these products also happen to have really cool stories like they weren't supposed to work out and yet something happened that made them really successful. So I'm going to walk you through a couple examples of some businesses that I think will give you some inspiration. Regardless of how small you think that your product or your idea or the thing that you're working on is, it has the potential to hit that inflection point. And one little thing can really change everything. So let's start over here. This is one of my favorite examples. We have this Box here of Quest bars. Quest was founded by a contact of mine, he's spoken at the Capitalism Conference, one of our yearly events. It was founded by Tom Bilyeux and Tom Bilyeu was like, hey, you know, why aren't there protein bars that are perfectly macro balanced for the diet that he follows? And so he was hand cutting these, hand baking and cutting Quest bars for the first leg of his business. This business has now been invested in by a bunch of people. So investors are getting returns. They're now they've sold millions and millions and millions of these to people who have lost weight, to people who credit these with their success, people like me who spend a bunch of money with them and they've done over a billion dollars in sales in seven years. That's ridiculous. Can you imagine cooking these in your kitchen to doing a billion dollars in sales? That's what can happen. It's not like that's the common story, but that's the kind of stuff that can happen. A very similar thing happened with this one RX bar. Now I'm not gonna say all the money's in bars obviously, but this is another business that did exactly that. They were. Now here's the secret, if you will. Here's a really cool insight that I want you to take away. Both of these businesses were in really competitive markets, but they started by launching to a very core small group of people. So RXBar launched to the CrossFit crowd in quest. They launched it to the low carb community and I think specifically the key keto community. Although I don't know the keto community was that big back then. But both of them launched to rabid audiences to start and then they hit an inflection point because they had bloggers talking about them because they had influencers talking about them. And that's when they could really start to scale. Here's another one. This is a really cool example and it's going to lead into another example that's not food related. So a mushroom coffee, which by the way, was there a market for mushroom coffee before this company? No. So if you've got an idea in your brain or you're working on something that doesn't have a market or doesn't meet the criteria that everybody says you should follow when selling a product. Well, what about mushroom coffee? What about bulletproof coffee? What about mold free coffee? Was there a market for MCT Oil five years ago? No. Right. This was built by demand, mostly through influencers. But you don't have to be the influencer four Sigmatic was not really a big company until they started sponsoring podcasts. And podcasts are a great way sponsoring podcasts, sponsoring YouTube channels are a great way to start marketing your brand. And if it's to the right audience, brands like this can just hit. Can just go through the roof and they're just absolutely killing it right now. Which reminds me of an example I discovered. Mushroom Coffee. Four Sigmatic specifically. But by listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, which there's another brand here, Athletic greens. They've done some really cool things and they're basically one product that does most of their volume. And a premium product.

Like, way more expensive than their competitors and they outsell most of their competitors. Both of these brands got big with influencers, specifically podcasters, bloggers, and authors. I'm going to show you another example of an author here in a second. But what's really cool about this is influencers that talk about physical products may not talk about you just because you paid them. They might just pick you up. For example, we have a member in our community who sells maps, like maps that you put on the wall and you can highlight where you've been in the world. And Tim Ferriss, who really put athletic greens on the market, who helped put four Sigmatic on the market by talking about it on his podcast. Tim Ferriss picked it up and talked about it in one of his Friday emails. And guess what that did to the map? Sales. They went through the roof. Now, that came from having a really good product out in the marketplace selling well, and it just happened to get in front of the right person and that took off. And that means other people are going to pick up on it. And the snowball starts to roll. And one day it he might decide to sell that business or to sell a part of that business, which changes everything about his life and career and the investors that are putting money into it. And that's when things can really take off. We could go through every single thing on this shelf here. And this is just food. Let's look at some things that aren't necessarily food. Right here on my shelf. I just came out of the closet. There, you see there? Don't make that a blog headline. Ryan Moran comes out of the closet in a video. Literally. Anyway, this is an essential oil diffuser. It's another super crowded saturated market, but we have a student who sells over a million dollars a month in essential oils and essential oil diffusers. So the secret here again, having a good product with distribution, that distribution can be Amazon. It can Be influencers. But one little inflection can change everything. One of those inflection points can happen when people just start to organically talk about you. So on my shelf right here, here's one of my favorite books ever. This is the Primal Connection by a guy named Mark Sisson. Mark has been on my podcast, which is called Freedom Fastlane. We talk about business and investing. And Mark was just an author and a blogger. Then he started a physical products brand. And then physical products brand has attracted investors and has customers all over the place. Some of his stuff is in Whole Foods here in Austin, Texas. But what's really cool about this is since he's a blogger, two weeks ago, we got a spike in traffic from one of our products, which is on Amazon. And it was because Mark linked to it on his blog. And we started getting. We didn't ask him to, we didn't pay him to. He just picked it up. It was kind of marketed to his kind of people, and sales really spiked because one blogger and influencer picked it up. And that's going to start the snowball rolling. So this is one of the brands that I built and sold. I had my big payday. So I just want you to know that what you are building is way bigger and way more impactful than you think. Whether you're still in the idea mode or you were selling millions of dollars a year, it's one inflection point, one insight, one person away from changing everything. And if you need a new set of insights, if you need a new set of people, if you need a new set of strategies because you're doing things the way that everybody else is, or you're stuck on Amazon, you're playing the review game. You're worried about changes that are happening in the marketplace. And you know that it's people and it's strategies and it's insights that are ultimately gonna take you to where you wanna go. There's a couple things you can do. One, we podcast about this regularly. My podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. We're also outlining some new podcasts that we're gonna launch on my company website, which is capitalism.com and number two, you can get around people who are doing this actively. We have an event that's called the Brand Builder Summit. You can find out more about that@brand buildersummit.com that's all physical products investors, physical products builders, physical products advisors. It's my team that comes in because I invest in physical products brands. I'm actually putting together a fund to invest in physical products, brands. So it's my investors, my colleagues who are there looking for new opportunities, looking to share insights because they want the companies that they're a part of to grow. So that's@brandbuildersummit.com we also do an entrepreneurial event every year that is about business and cash flow and investing. And that's the Capitalism Conference. That's@the capitalismconference.com so I just wanted you to see some examples because I tend to learn by example. And all of these started as an idea and then they hit some sort of inflection point and then money poured in in the form of investors and advisors. And that's when everything changes. So.

If you believe in what you are doing, if you believe in your products, you believe in your market, keep going. Keep reaching out to people who have impact. Keep going and posting content and putting your message out there. Because it only takes one person, one insight to change everything. And if you need some help, we do that at our event. If you sell physical products, I'd recommend the Brand Builder Summit. And that's at brandbuildersummit. Com. Hey, thanks for watching. I believe in what you're doing as an entrepreneur and if we can be a resource for you, we would love to do that. Let us know how we could do it in the comments. Hope to see you at one of our events and we are rooting for you as an entrepreneur at capitalism. Com.