My Sales Grew 200% With Fewer Products (Empire Report: Challenges, Growth & Strategic Shifts)

Hey guys. Welcome to the pod. I thought it would be fun today to just give you an update on what is going on in my businesses as kind of an empire report to document my journey and where I'm at in the process. So I made the decision at the beginning of this year to take all of my holdings in physical product brands and put them into a holding company. So I originally had, you know, a partner in this brand and then, you know, this group of team members on this brand. And instead I just took the three brands that I care the most about and put them under one holding company. And that was a good decision. And that became kind of the second division of my empire. Of course, the primary division of my empire is capitalism.com that is my personal brand. It's our students results. It is my book. 12 months to 1 million. And so at the beginning of this year, we started with two divisions. We had the holding company of brands and we had capitalism.com over the last six months, we put all of our focus@capitalism.com into doing a few things extremely well. We made the 1% the best program of its kind. Our students are getting amazing results. It's very fulfilling to watch their growth. And if you haven't been paying attention, we just did a podcast with one of our members named Alina. And Alina launched her business in late 2023, I think December of 2023. And I remember when she did her update post about making the first 10,000, and now a year and a half later, she's got a million and a half, almost a $2 million a year business getting results like that. And it feels so great and so fulfilling to see that. And that is partially because we've been focusing on just this one thing that has been very healthy for the business. We did not do the capitalism conference in 2025. We put our Capitalism incubator on pause. We're just now bringing that back after rebuilding it, we put a lot of our focus, almost all of our focus, into just making the 1% great. And that program now makes more revenue than the entire business did a year ago. And so that has been wonderful for team morale and momentum and fulfillment and for cash flow. On the physical product side of things, we have three brands in this portfolio. There is Sheer Strength, which is my old supplement company that I bought back from private equity. We have Switch Supplements, which I co founded with my partner Tomer. And then there's Sinless Snacks, which is a company we acquired from, from a fund that we raised. And these three brands at the beginning of the year, only made up about $200,000 a month in revenue, if that. And as a result of sticking to a 9% target growth rate over the entire year, our we knew that we would hit about $5 million in total revenue. Right now were averaging like 3, 2350amonth. That brings us up to like beginning of June 2025. In June, some things happened and they've been real challenges. In May of 2025, my Director of ops got a new opportunity that he couldn't say no to. And it was what was best for him and his family. And I was really happy for him. But he was a core piece of the business and with him stepping out, it kind of became a brick in the wall that got pulled out and that loosened up some other pieces. And as a result, we realized we couldn't really pursue this system anymore or this process anymore, and we started to cut things. And some people on the team got spooked and decided to pursue some other opportunities and the team got smaller. That's been an interesting journey because I've done both introspection of looking at like, I mean, did I do something in order to create a sense of instability in the team and, you know, multiple people decided to exit or was this just kind of the natural swings of the marketplace? And honestly, I don't know. I don't know that it matters. What does matter is how I respond to the situation and how I create vision moving forward and how I pursue other team members that are fit with that vision. It's forced me to sit down and think about the direction of the sails of the ship. When we go through setbacks or periods of contraction, whether that is contraction of revenue or contraction of people or contraction of opportunity, it forces you to pause and think, where are we going? What are we doing here? When I'm flying high, it's easy to just say, oh, this is going to keep going forever and we're going to keep continuing growth. But when things are reduced, it forces you to go, hmm, okay, is this really where I want to go? And it's forced me to take a beat and reestablish our vision to make sure that we're heading in the right direction. So in the short run, it was kind of scary or at least uncertain to see some core team members exit the business. It was also uncertain to see revenue come down over a 45 day period. But the pearl or the diamond and all that pressure was that it forced me to reset vision and reset the direction in which we're heading. That's been, that's been a real blessing because it's shown me how pulled in multiple directions I was previously. It's shown me how simple I can keep the business. It's shown me what types of people I need on the team for the next chapter. One of the things that I've really been craving lately is a conviction in one direction. You ever wake up and feel like you got so many things going on that none of it feels meaningful? I had been craving for the last few months the, the excitement of waking up and just like tearing into one thing. Like I remember when I was writing my book 12 months to 1 million. I had like eight weeks where I had to work on that book for like two hours at a time. It got all of my focus. I plugged in headphones, turned off notifications and I was just plugging away. And it was hard, but it was really fulfilling. And I've been, I've been craving that. And although it was the right thing to bring my physical product brands into one portfolio and to focus on one thing inside of capitalism.com, i still felt pulled into the meeting for this brand. And then we're going to grow our audience and we should think about our next event or our next conference. I felt pulled in all of these directions and, and, and where I'm at now is I'm starting to see how simple we can keep each business and how if I have one great partner in this part of the business, it frees me up to focus on what, whatever that next challenge is going to be for me. So right now, what that looks like for me is hiring somebody on my, the brand side of my portfolio to be the VP of OPS or the Director of OPS or COO or head Brand manager, whatever you want that one person who understands my vision so well and is able to execute that on a day to day basis so that I can meet more people, get more resources, come up with new ideas. I used to have that in my business when I ran it with my co founder. His name was Matt. He was the integrator, I was the visionary and we were magic together. I'm now actively hiring for that person for my portfolio. And then on the capitalism.com side of things, it means going out and doing podcasts and appearances on other YouTube channels, which I haven't done in a long time. And I miss it. I actually light up the most when I am on the stage or when I'm on other people's show and our audience grows and we get exposure and the business kind of takes care of itself. I've been pulled in so many different directions that I haven't been able to do that. So this pause or this short contraction period allowed me to become introspective enough to identify what pieces of the business were most important and which parts of the business deserved my focus. And you know, it was kind of a cool thing in a weird way when the business contracted, contracted for just a short period of time, but it made me deal with those emotions of fear of losing money or fear of losing status. What if my business goes under and everybody judges me? What if, what if this project becomes a failure? What if I have to admit to people that this didn't work out? Well, of course, I mean, that didn't happen. It was, it was, it was 45 days of contraction. But it made me deal with those things. And once I dealt with those fears, I was able to say, okay, who do I need to become in order to lead the next chapter of growth? And it made me look at my habits, it made me look at how I'm spending my time, it made me look at the conversations that I have with people, made me be real honest about what I'm doing, that is creating this situation. And so I recommitted to my daily habits of early wake ups, hard workouts, honest conversations, and that's hard work. And once you kind of get through this period of developing those habits, things start to move again. And I have felt this liberation of energy coming back into my work and I'm starting to get excited again about moving things forward. It's like when that ball starts to roll and get a little bit of momentum, it's really hard to get it moving. But once it moves, you're just excited that it's moving again and it feels good and fun to be in motion. Oh, you know, there's one more thing we did and that was we started a new YouTube channel. And it's where we're hosting all of the interviews that we do@capitalism.com and I, I, I made that decision, which was not an easy short term decision because I was moving it away from my personal channel which has150,000 plus subscribers and starting on a brand new channel with zero subs. And I wish I had done that two years ago, but I didn't because I didn't want to give up the momentum of my personal brand. I finally bit the bullet and built that second channel because I want capitalism.com to start to become more than the ryan show and capitalism.com is never going to grow beyond that if it's always on my personal channel and we have 15 years of history of making content under Ryan Daniel Moran and for better or worse, it was really dependent on me and my network and me doing things in order to drive the business. I wanted to free that up to be fun again and move the business to a fresh channel that has been slow but steady and is picking up some traction. We're in the middle of publishing season one, we have season two almost fully recorded. And guess what happened when that energy was liberated. All of a sudden the personal brand got to be fun and light and creative again and it started to grow, started to grow at a faster rate than it's ever grown ever. Pretty amazing how that works. We just de stressed it allowed for there to be creativity, allowed for their the life to come back to that and now all of a sudden the it is growing. I continually have to learn the lesson that when you do things for a result, you kill the magic that creates the result. But if you pursue the magic, the creativity, the fun, the lightness, the, the energy, if you, if you make that the goal, then the results take care of themselves. But when the goal is the results, you kind of kill the magic. So what do we do about this paradox? Well, what we do about this paradox is we set the goal so that we can be appropriate in our behavior, but we still pursue the magic, the creativity, the energy, the joy, the fun. And as a result, we can have fun and energy and creativity en route to the goal rather than waiting for the goal to feel all good about ourselves. This is the lesson that I have to learn. Oh, you know, every year, twice a year, every week, every day. But when I learn it and when I get it, things tend to take care of themselves. On a personal note, I moved this year. I bought a house. It's been a big improvement for my children. Love the area in which I live. I do miss the hustle and bustle of being downtown. Find myself isolating a bit. But now that I have re optimized my time with early wake ups, I have optimized my work priorities, my body with hard workouts, I'm feeding my mind. Now that I have done these other habits. Now the area of my life that I want to optimize or improve is my relationships, my social life and building proper routines so that I'm plugged into community, which is something that has been neglected for way too long. Couple of habits that have been absolutely revolutionary to my Life. One, choosing an investment practice like a plan that I'm going to stick to for decades freed up so much mental energy for me. Because instead of looking at like, should I buy Bitcoin or should I invest in this thing over here, having a plan that I'm gonna stick to for a long period of time freed up so much mental energy. Cause I know that it's gonna compound into hundreds of millions of dollars. All I gotta do is stick to the plan. And the other is waking up before I want to. Right now, I'm sticking to the plan of just, just making it a habit to be up by 6:15. Eventually I'll dial that back to 6 5:45, 5:30. The earlier that I wake up, the happier I tend to be. And I think part of that is just the fact that immediately when I wake up, I do something I don't want to do, which is get out of bed. And now everything else in my life just feels easier by comparison. If I wake up and do something hard like go to the gym, my. My life is 60% better. My stress levels are down in half. I'm not kidding. I got a notification from my OURA ring last week that said my average beats per minute was down 10. Like my average heart rate dropped by 10 beats per minute because my stress levels were down. Thing I changed. Waking up early can't quite explain it, but it makes my life so much better. And I put a lot of money into PayPal stock this year. This is not investment advice, but that was like the stock that I researched the most and found to be the most undervalued. So you can track that and see if I'm right or wrong over the next couple of years. But the numbers just seem to make sense for me. And if you want to discover more about my investment practice, my investment thesis, I've got podcasts and a video all about what I decided to do with my money. Last point. I have this, this thing that I'm kicking around that I want to do@capitalism.com we're about to relaunch our Capitalism incubator, which is just for entrepreneurs who are over a million and they want to scale and prepare for an exit over the next couple of years. And something that I want to do once we get some really good case studies in there, we already have some really good ones, but I want to get more in there to prove out. The model is I want to take minority stakes in these businesses and I want to have a mastermind of 10 to 20 people that came through the incubator are preparing for an eight figure exit and I own 10 to 20% of their business. And the mastermind is all these businesses that are aligned going in the same direction and I can advise them on maximizing their exit and help them put in the right people. And it gets me really excited to think about not just selling a program but actually becoming part of a business. Because the thing that will add the most value to one of these entrepreneurs journey is when I'm sitting there on a Friday night and I'm having dinner with a contact that I had on the podcast. I'm like hey actually you should meet so and so that I own 15% of because your audience would be a perfect fit to promote this product. Me bringing that network and that experience and my experience with selling companies that will be the most value won't come from the program, there'll be a ton of value from that but the real value will be that strategic advice ongoing with those brands. And so I think the the back end of this program that we're launching is going to be me becoming an equity advisor to a few of my favorite brands in this group and advising them to continue on down the eight figure path. I am very confident and very convicted about what we're doing for entrepreneurs right now. Not up until now. It's been 10 years of helping people accomplish seven figure businesses. We've got hundreds of success stories. Now a good amount of my focus is moving into helping those seven figure businesses go into the multi seven figures and pursue an eight figure exit which has always been part of what I do. But it's never been a concentrated focus and I'm really excited to help that group of people cause I know it can add a lot of value to them. So if that's you, please reach out if you would like some help or you want to talk about how we can help. I'm ryan@capitalism.com thank you for listening to this personal and professional update on my empire and I appreciate you following my work. Thanks for being here. I'll see you guys next time. Take care.