quick update on my businesses

Hey everybody. Welcome to capitalism dot com. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and today what I thought we'd do is give you an update on what's going on in my own businesses. So I'm going to walk you through the brands that I am invested in and am active in. So we're not going to talk about passive investments or the small deals that we do. I just want to walk you through what's working in our brands because we made some changes recently. And also I'll give you an update on what I'm investing in right now just because I thought that that would be fun to talk about. So first, let's start with the story that this is the gift that keeps on giving. This story, the story of sheer strength. Sheer strength, as you know, is the business that I built and sold back in 2017 and I wrote my book about it and the owner went bankrupt.

It could be a whole entire podcast about what they did wrong to bankrupt this company. But we're going to keep things optimistic today. And the, the, the hard part of the turnaround since I bought this company back has been just getting life back into this company. I mean when we took this over it was doing 30 or $40,000 a month. It used to do 30 to $40,000 a day when we, when we owned it back in 2017. So trying to infuse life back into this business was the hardest part. And it took a good, a good handful of months to get the wheels turning again. Well, we've now got three products that sell consistently every day. The brand did its first hundred thousand dollar month in November of 2024 and then in December we did about 120,000. I'm recording this the first week of January 2025 and the, the last few weeks of the brand have been down slightly. Instead of doing about $4,000 a day, we do maybe $3,200. So we're on pace for right around $100,000 a month. And we want a couple of our products saw just a slight decline in, in sales. We can explain that a hundred different ways, but that's just the reality of slide slight decline in sales. We are launching our fourth product later this month and when that is live we will have completed the four product formula four products getting them to 25 sales a day, more than $30 price point and that should put us about 150 grand a month. I am, this is a successful year for this brand. If we do two to two and a half million dollars in revenue, we'd be Right on track for that four to five year target of being back near an eight figure valuation, which is just nuts to think about. We still have lots of work to do. There's still some frustrating things about the business and the brand. There's things that I wish we were doing differently that we're not. But overall it's been an amazing progress and I hope he's enjoyed me documenting this again for the second time because I hope to be an example that it's still possible. Friends, Markets more saturated now, inflation and whatever it's hey, guess what? We're still building multimillion dollar businesses. So that's the first update that I'll give you. The second update I will give you is on our little side project called Switch. It was started as a fun project during COVID to teach my team how to build a brand because I was the only person on the team that knew how to create a physical products brand. And here we are helping out build physical product brand. I'm the only person who's done it. That has since changed and now there are people on the team who specialize in building physical products brands. But at the time I just wanted to teach my team how this works. And about two years ago I partnered with somebody on this and it's been a little side project for both of us, but now it's finally starting to catch some life and it's doing maybe $40,000 a month. Not going to set the world on fire, but I think there's a chance that in 2025 this business gets at least close to a million dollar run rate. Didn't follow the 12 months to 1 million plan at all. It took a lot longer than that. But my partner Tomer and I are both really proud of the product that is selling a lot in that business, which is a sleep supplement which I take every day. It's called Kill Switch Sleep like you're dead. And we're reformulating the first product which was a morning nootropic called On Switch that has been out of stock for longer than I care to admit. Again, this is a side project for both of us. But if that business does $1 million this year and sheer does two or two and a half this year we got a nice little portfolio of two brands that do collectively three and a half million dollars or so. And then there's a third brand in our portfolio that we own a majority stake in and it is a snack brand called Sinless Snacks. Sinless Snacks had its first million dollar year in 2024. So this year, good chance that that business will do 1.5 or so. Now there's three small brands in this little portfolio. The reason I'm telling you about, about these three brands in particular is because I made the decision to take each of these three brands and to put them into one holding company. And the reason I did that is because I had three different sets of operations, three different managers, three different sets of reporting, a couple across these three different brands. But if we look at them collectively, they'll Overall probably do $5 million in 2025. And I thought, well, that that's the same. That's actually more revenue than capitalism.com does. Instead of just scattering all my operations all over the place, let's centralize this behind a group of people, a team that actually trust, give them the reins and invest in this like a real proper holding company rather than three scattered focuses. And now the team that has been involved in this side project over here is seeing how their contributions are part of a much bigger holding company. So I share all of this with you because when I think about things in terms of enterprise value instead of cash flow, I can all of a sudden make better long term decisions. And it was a better long term decision. At least that's the idea of taking these three businesses that are sort of flopping around on their own as very small businesses, putting them into one holding company. And now it has collective revenues of $5 million year one. And with the right team in place, that will grow to seven and a half ten over time. What this really does is allow us to raise capital to be able to fund that growth. Right now they're all self funded. But if we want to raise capital on one brand, that would be at a lower valuation than if we were to raise capital on a holding company, on a portfolio, even at $5 million. Now we've got a group of brands rather than one little brand over here that's just flopping around trying to stay alive. So I often talk about enterprise value instead of cash flow. And this is one of the ways that we are generating more enterprise value with our brands is by putting them together into one portfolio rather than having multiple sets of operations. And now that we have the team focused on this one business instead of multiple small businesses, I anticipate that the growth will happen a lot smoother and a lot faster within that that portfolio. Now let's talk about capitalism.com to capitalism.com is my main focus. This is how I build my audience. This is how I get my partnerships this is where I meet investors. This is where I mentor entrepreneurs. And we've been flat over the last two years in terms of revenue and profit being. Our profit was down a little bit this year, but we ended the year with back to back months where we did over $100,000 in profit, which is really good for us as a company. And we did on the back of really good work. Our, our clientele is getting better results than we've ever gotten, and we're really proud of that. We also had some tailwinds in the, in the fact that we are doing much more regular classes and sprints that we sell and promote publicly, and that gives us new client flow. So we finally, I would encourage all of you to do this. We went back and looked at our books from the last three years and we said, when did we make the most profit? And we, we, they all, all the months that had the highest amount of profit. And our high months of profit were anything over $100,000 in profit. That's, that's a really strong profit month for us. And we said, all right, what did we do in our best months? And they all, all of them, 100% of them had the same story in all of those months. We sold a Class A short sprint, three to five days, and then we upsold our higher margin products to that group of buyers. That's it. And we kind of laughed and said, well, it worked so well, let's never do that again in three years. We did that like five times, and every single time they were ridiculously profitable. So we said, okay, let's do this again. And we did one in November, we did one in December, and they were our most profitable months of the year. Ding, ding, ding. Maybe we should do this more often. Maybe we should make this a core part of our strategy. Is it the most efficient way to grow the business? Probably not. Is it the most predictable thing that we're sitting on that we could do pretty much every month? Yeah. Yeah, we could. So in testing that and doing really good work, we generated more profit per month than most of our other months in 2024. And that's a core part of our strategy moving into 2025. I want to share with you what I am investing in right now. But before I do that, I'm going to share with you a project I fumbled. A project that has been. Well, I just didn't execute it well at all. In 2024, we launched the Capitalism Marketplace. And the Capitalism Marketplace is this really complicated but elegant tech platform where investors could invest in the projects that were coming from our network. And there was a lot of hard work that went into building this platform. And what I didn't factor in was that the real hard work would be onboarding investors into the platform, getting them excited about the deals that we have in our portfolio and getting them to transact. I actually thought that would be the easy part. And I just didn't have the capacity to figure it out. I just didn't have the, the bandwidth to be able to add that project onto all other projects. That's. That's the, the sore spot on my 2024. That's the project that I fumbled. It's my fault. Wish I had done it differently. And I have to find a way to fix that in 2025. It's too cool of an opportunity. It's too impactful for our audience. It's too exciting for the people who follow our work. And it's too helpful to the brands that we advise and mentor to not pursue that opportunity. But I fumbled it. And so I think what we'll need to do moving ahead is I think I'll need to hire a relationship manager whose job it is to onboard investors onto the platform and get them excited about these deals. Not sure if we need somebody for that full time right now, but I think that if we're going to make this a real project, I might need to hire somebody who's dedicated to that specifically. I'm still kicking that around, but I owe it to the people who have, who have trusted us to advise them and help them raise capital and to the people who have said that they'd be really excited to participate in some of these brands. I just haven't cracked that nut yet. But that's, that's my struggle project that I will figure out. But it has been the thing that I'm a little bit embarrassed about. That didn't go as well as I wanted it to in 2024. In 2025, on the personal side, I am moving. I bought a house and I'm still not sure if that's the right decision. This, just for my own documentation. I'm putting this on camera right now as I sit here a few weeks away from moving in my new place. I'm not. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Not sure if it's a good move. Like I made this decision because it. I, I know that the next few years are going to be me in dad mode. I'm going to be a really good dad the next few years. And I think that this house is the best thing for my kids. But it's not where I wanted to be. It's not what I wanted to do. I don't get excited about this place. It's cool, it's nice, it's great. It's just I don't have a lot of juice behind it right now. My kids do. And it's going to be great for them. But as I sit here right now, this is one of those things that I'm not sure if I'm going to regret in a year. But if it. But the way I'm justifying it is if in a year I'm not happy with it, I just sell it and get something else. So make the decision, move in, go kill it in business. Go kill it in all the areas of your life. And if you're not happy with that one, sell it and get a new house. Ryan. Geez, you're overthinking it. My goodness, you're such a drama queen sometimes. Let's wrap this up with just some investment decisions. This is not investment advice. This is me documenting my own journey. For all of you. I really enjoyed the accountability of sharing my investment decisions publicly. Both in my little newsletter called the Billionaire Next Door. You can subscribe to it over@capitalism.com Billionaire and when I update it here on the channel, the fact that I know I'm going to share it keeps me accountable to my plan. So this month I made two investments. One into the S&P 500. And as part of my plan I have to, I have to, I have to, I have to invest $15,000 a month into long term index funds that I don't plan to touch for decades. I have to do that as part of my plan in order to account for my own stupidity. Because I have proven that I will make dumb investment decisions. But If I invest $15,000 a month into broad based index funds for the next 40 years, then I will leave a legacy of at least $100 million. So if nothing else, I will leave the next generation $100 million. The second part of my plan is putting as much as I'm comfortable in to one of the stocks from my watch list. And right now the highest conviction investment that I have right now is PayPal. PayPal I think just has the most obvious in terms of like balance sheet, growth, projection, moat. I think PayPal is just an obvious play. I think it's underpriced my own opinion. There are people who disagree with me. So I made an allocation into PayPal.

I think I put in 15,000. So I matched what I put into the index funds and I now have a significant amount of my portfolio in PayPal. For me, what I have in there is, is almost as much as I'm comfortable with. I might do one more allocation in there, but that's about as much as I think is wise to have invested in one company for me right now. So I will be looking to refresh my watch list and see what other businesses are.

The, the, the highest conviction plays moving forward. I'll keep you posted on that here on the channel. So stay tuned. Overall, my wealth plan going into 2025 is I make my cash flow helping entrepreneurs@Capitalism.com this is what pays for my team, what pays for my life, what pays for my investments. I build my enterprise value with a portfolio of physical product brands and by running a fund that invests in physical product brands. And as part of that we have this portfolio of brands that I own a majority stake in that we're now building a team around and that we're growing back to, you know, an eight figure valuation. And I'm growing my own personal long term wealth with long term investments. And that's kind of the update of where we are in all three of those categories. If you are an entrepreneur, you're watching this and you need help getting to the first million. The best place for you to work with me/us is inside of the 1%. You can find out more about that@capitalism.com 1. If you are an entrepreneur who's past $1 million and you want to work with my team on building enterprise value so that you can have a multimillion dollar exit. We're doing some really cool things in our incubator right now. This is where we can connect people with the resources that help them grow their business and build enterprise value so they can have a multimillion dollar exit. And you can find out more about that over at capitalism.com Inc. That's Inc. Capitalism.com Inc. Thank you for watching and listening. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. This is my empire report for January 2025. Thank you for watching and listening. I said that already. I'll see you on the next episode. Take care.