Scaling To 8-Figures And Beyond

There is a lot of change coming. We are already seeing it specifically in real estate. I think Amazon is changing the absolute world. That is a no duh statement. Change is happening and what I truly believe is you need to be able to embrace the change and you need to be flexible to the change or you will die.

The tagline of my company is create the change. All change is happening because of human beings, whether it's in your own life or it's global change. Right. So things are changing. You might as well stand there and be part of it and actually make that change happen. Absolutely.

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now, your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

Hey, guys. Tyler, Edwin Atwell here to introduce today's episode with Justin Colby. Justin is a full time real estate investor and the host of the Science of Flipping. In this conversation, Justin gets Ryan to share his approach to making eight figures. Here's the hint, it's not bitcoin. Without further ado, here's Ryan's chat with Justin Colby.

I have a very, very special guest here with me today, Mr. Ryan Moran. And dude, before I get to you, I got to get through some paperwork stuff. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, go get my book. It's absolutely free. The same book that is on Amazon that I sell for $15 every single day. Go to the website the Science of Flipping. Download it for free. Thescienceoflipping.com if you are interested in coaching, mentoring, boardrooms, masterminds, it's all on the website, including episodes from previous podcasts at a very minimum. Get there, listen to the previous episodes. I interview some incredible people from moguls like Mr. Ryan Moran to just, you know, do it yourself. Investors all the way across the board. I'm here to help. I'm here to bring different perspectives. So welcome to the science flipping, everybody. But more Importantly, dude, welcome Mr. Ryan Moran. What's up, dude?

I feel like Mr. Burns, rubbing my hands together, going, excellent. I'm ready to do this, Justin. Let's go.

Dude, your energy is already up. I love it. It's probably because you're in Austin, Texas, right? And so what time is it there right now?

It doesn't matter. I did my 10 pushups today and that's why I have my energy perfect.

I love that.

How I get this physique. Ten pushups every morning.

I've Pounded five cups of coffee, no big deal. Same, same.

So I'll let you tell your story. And for those of you who know Ryan, this is a big interview. This is a huge episode. You guys need to take notes, turn off your social media. This guy is a impressive businessman to the tune of multiple seven figures. But he has created a business model that has been that everyone would like to replicate from just the kind of cash flow side of things, to acquiring other businesses, to being able to sell businesses for seven figures and being able to move through changing times. And I think that's one of the main topics I want to get with Ryan with today. But go ahead and kind of enlighten people on who you are and what you've done. Because dude, you're, you're impressive for sure.

Alright, so you flip things, right?

Flip them, yeah.

So I flip things too.

Got it.

I just don't flip houses.

Okay.

Five years, four years ago, I bought an investment for $600 and four months ago I sold that investment.

For eight figures, mid eight figures. So eight figures would be $10 million. If you run the numbers on bitcoin. The reason I laugh at bitcoin people is because they're like, well, what if it doubles again? And I'm like $600 into many, many millions of dollars. You can take your bitcoin, turn it sideways and put it somewhere. So this is my model. I start businesses and I acquire businesses that are all based on physical products, usually consumer goods, consumable products. And the reason for this is because I know how to sell them and market them. And because they, the valuations on these types of companies right now are absolutely absurd. So just this past week as we're recording this, there's a company called rxbar. Do you know who that is? They're like, they're like little protein bars.

Yeah, protein bars.

Yeah. Well, they're only a few years old and they just sold the Kellogg's for $600 million.

Crazy.

An acquaintance of mine, Tom Bilyeu, founded Quest Nutrition, went from zero to, to half a billion dollars in annual revenue in less than five years. So the consumer product space, or the physical product space, contrary to what a lot of people will say, because all the attention and money is looking elsewhere, is where I'm seeing the highest valuations of companies and where the most wealth created. So my model, I build these physical products companies and I get them to seven figures in profit and then I can either scale them or I might package them as part of a roll up. And if you have $10 million in profit via a roll up. Like you get your buddies together who all have million dollar companies, you do a roll up together that can be sold for 8 to 12x on profit. So your $1 million company could put $10 million into your pocket which is taxed favorably because it's capital gains and then invested for passive income or whatever you want to do. My play is I want to buy the Cleveland Indians. I've wanted that since I was 8 years old. And that has always been my guiding light principle. So I teach this model not because I like selling information products, but because it gives me more access to deal flow, because it gives me more students that I can do roll ups with. It opens me up to new opportunities. Like I've had businesses in a thousand retail stores across the country because a retail broker found me as a result of me talking about this stuff. Primary business. My singular focus, my singular skill is building these physical products companies, scaling them to be seven figure and eight figure businesses, and then selling them or positioning them as roll ups to large private equity groups or acquisition funds. And that sounds fancy and sexy. It's actually just a lot of work. And I basically have created the blueprint for doing that. And I give that blueprint away on our webinars and my podcast and stuff like that because I want as many million dollar businesses as possible. And I am driven by a belief, Justin, that entrepreneurs solve problems, that government causes problems and that we need more successful people, we need more wealthy people, we need more greedy 1 percenters, and we need to get the government the hell out of our way because we solve problems and create wealth and create jobs. And that is the only hope. We are the best shot that we have at making the world a better place and solving every problem, that trade brings down barriers and that government creates them and that by teaching more entrepreneurs, we make a way bigger impact in the world than anything else that we could possibly do.

I tend to agree with every philosophy you have right there. So there's, there's that. So. And I don't want to bring our listeners down kind of the rabbit hole of exactly how to run your model. I'm absolutely at the end, I want them to follow you find you listen to your podcast, we'll get you, you know, at the end you can tell them everything. Right. One place obviously is capitalism.com, right. Your site. At the end of the day, I think something about entrepreneurship, everyone wants it, right? Whether they're going to be successful at it or not is going to be up to them. Right? Because to your point, as sexy as you just painted your picture and selling for eight figures, how much work did that involve?

It's a lot of freaking work. But I will tell you this, Justin.

I don't know that I could have.

Learned this any other way than grinding for many, many years. But I have realized, I've realized now that I worked as hard as I have because I believed I needed to work as hard as I have. And now that I'm at a certain level, I turned 30 last week. And I've realized now that, that there are faster ways to make seven and eight figures. For example.

I've built and sold eight figure companies. I've received eight figure checks. Woo hoo. Yay. If I don't do anything stupid, I'm set for life. Great. Hooray. I can do whatever I want now, which is build more businesses. And the fact of the matter is, once I got the check, it was just like new level unlocked. And now I think, all right, how do I do another eight figure payday? And the answers that come up are usually a lot simpler than, well, I'm going to start another company for $600 and work my life away for the next four years. Make no mistake, starting with $600, building up a company in four years I sold for eight figures is a really great story for a podcast. I could break down exactly how I did that. But what's even sexier is the next eight figure payday that I'll get by working a lot less and just working smarter. Now, I could have asked myself that question four years ago. How do I get an eight figure check? And I probably could have saved myself a lot of stress, but I don't know that I ever would have actually learned what was possible had I not gone through the grind. Now I say that because I don't know if you can pass the lesson on without somebody going through the grind. But I found that the results we get are largely in part to the questions that we ask ourselves. And so if we ask ourselves a question, how can I get my million dollars or how do I get my $10 million without working 80 hours a week or 100 hours a week, you will find answers to that question. And I wish I had asked the question earlier of how do I get my eight figures or build the business that I want without killing myself? Because I have definitely paid for the amount of work and stress that I put into getting to the eight figure payday and now working on the nine figure payday so we can go into that. But one takeaway would be to ask yourself very specific questions of what you want and how you get there, because you will get answers to that.

Well, here to relate to what you're saying. One of the. And I know you have an educational side to your business, obviously, and so do I. And I coach investors all the time. That the biggest heartache for me, the biggest issue, the biggest challenge is they just want to be where I'm at. But they didn't take a look at the 10 years it took me to get here. Right. And they want to be able to expedite that learning curve. And when you bring up the question, could you have reached your high point in collecting that eight figure check without going through the grind? My answer to you is going to be emphatically no. But you could have probably either sped it up a little bit and or leveraged some of your time now that you kind of know what you know. So you weren't. Your grind probably was pretty, pretty crazy, right? I mean, I get that, but you have to do the work. There's no entrepreneur that's out there that says, oh, I want to take $600 and turn it to eight figures. It doesn't happen without doing the work. Even if you personally had a mentor who could help you reduce the amount of time, shrink the learning curve, which is my next answer to all this, is making sure you always have a mentor. It doesn't matter what you and I were just talking prior to this, talking about business and what we could even do together. But.

There'S no way to get what you want without putting in the work. Even if you bring it down to relationships, Relationships aren't easy. You're not going to have this beautiful puppy dog and rainbows relationships all the time. Two, three, four, five years into a relationship, it's freaking work. You have to work to have the puppy dogs and rainbows. Right? I mean, there's no way to get what you want without putting in the work. And those that aren't willing to sacrifice, those that aren't willing to give up tv, those aren't willing to give up the personal luxuries to get what they want. I just have a very limited patience with that. Because you've done it. You've worked 80, 100 hours a week at times. I've done it. I gave up the things that most people would not give up. So I can reach a plateau, or not a plateau, but a peak of where I'm at and where I'm going to continue to go so along your lines, dude, why? I want to almost start to talk generally about entrepreneurialism, ownership. Right. You can't get there without the work. There's no chance. But you absolutely can shrink your learning curve. You can make less mistakes around it and get there faster.

There's a great book that no one talks about. It's like the best book that never was a best seller. It's called Straight Line Leadership. And one of the chapters, there's like one of these Hallmark phrases in Straight line leadership that says, figure out what you want, figure out what it's gonna cost to get it, and then decide if you're willing to pay that price.

Right.

And where most people mess up is they don't calculate what it's gonna take in order to get what they want. They say, I decide what I want.

And that's it. There's no calculation of figuring out what it's gonna cost and saying, am I willing to pay this price? Because, look, I might be a lot happier if I had smaller goals. Sure, I would probably be a lot happier if I just collected my $200, you know, when I passed go, invested my capital and called it a day. But I'm driven probably by some insecurity in order to reach really big goals. It's a lot of freaking work to get there. And it's okay if you are not willing to pay the price to get what you want. It is okay to give up what you want to want something else. It is simply a trade. And any trade is fine. You can have whatever you want as long as you are willing to pay whatever it costs to get there.

Yeah, it's. Everything's a choice, right? Don't tell, you know, you or me or anyone who maybe you're looking up to as a mentor, you know, saying, oh, I want this, I want this, I want this. And then we say, hey, have you done this? And you say, no. And we say, why haven't you? You give us reasons, like life, Right? I mean, everyone's excuse is life. My kids, my wife, my husband, my job, my. It's all life. We all get it.

So let me. Let me rephrase this. Everything is not a choice, but everything is a trade. Like, when you decide what you want, there is a required trade that has to happen.

Yep.

And you just have to be willing to choose if you are willing to make that trade. And it is okay to not make the trade. I just, like, it's okay for you to not buy Amazon stock 10 years ago. That was a trade. And Some people weren't comfortable with the risk. It would have paid off. But it is okay to not make the trade in any area of your life.

Would you buy Amazon stock today?

I would.

I am skeptical of markets as a whole.

Sure.

I have been skeptical of the markets for too many years. I have been wrong on the stock market, so you should probably not listen to a thing I have to say about investing in stocks.

Dude, I'm with you, dude. I mean, I put money in sales in places.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break.

And we'll return to the show in a second.

Oh, that.

I made the majority of my wealth by buildings scaling and selling physical products companies, and now I run a fund and a firm that purchases them. And when we want to grow our businesses, we heavily rely on the services of Viral Launch. You've heard them on the show before. I'd highly recommend that you go and listen to the episodes with Casey Goss because they have more data about what's working on Amazon.com, what products you should sell, how you should optimize your listings, what keywords you should go after. They have more data on that stuff than pretty much anybody else on the planet. So we rely on them to look at markets we should go into, what products we should release. And I would recommend that you at least check them out. And when you do, use the coupon code Capitalism to get a fat, hefty discount. We use them pretty heavily as a tool in our tool belt alongside just about everything else that we talk about here on the podcast. So head over to viral-launch.com to check them out and when you decide to test them, use the coupon code Capitalism.

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Let's get to the subject of. It's funny that we brought that up. I actually bring up, I was talking with my buddy yesterday and both of us are just, we're very similar to you entrepreneurs, grinders. Whatever it takes, we'll trade it. We're going right. We are going to reach where we want to go. And I was like, sometimes just being a server sounds pretty nice, right? Where it's like you get there 2pm, you leave by 10pm and you don't bring your work home with you. You have cash in your pocket.

Just the simplicity of that lifestyle sometimes sounds pretty nice. I can't lie right now. You don't get to do the cool shit that you and I probably get to do and travel and you don't get that. But you also don't get the, oh my God, I have 50 emails I gotta get back to and I have to do this and have to get these when it's 10 o' clock at night and 11 o' clock at night. Right? So it's a trade. I think that's the best thing you could say is it's a choice, but really it's a trade. What are you willing to trade.

To.

Get what you want? So I think that was a brilliant point on your part. I think what I want to kind of bring to light here is I'm a huge belief there is a lot of change coming. We are already seeing it specifically in real estate. I think Amazon is changing the absolute world. That is a no duh statement. Change is happening and what I truly believe is you need to be able to embrace the change and you need to be able to be flexible to the change or you will die. Right.

And so the tagline of my company is create the change.

Okay?

So.

All change is happening because of human beings, whether it's in your own life or it's because or it's global change. Right. So things are changing. You might as well stand there and be part of it and actually make that change happen. Absolutely. So and it is all available to you.

Absolutely. In part of what I'm saying in our industry, right, is there's so many different facets on how to buy a house, right. You can just buy it with a conventional loan, you can buy it with cash, you can buy it with hard money, you can do a lease. There's all these different avenues and if you aren't the person making the change or being the change, you're going to get caught on your heels and likely get knocked over because the change is going to come. Right? So that's just my industry going into lease options, seller financing and all these other different creative ways to get the same business model going. It's just different ways of acquiring. What were some things that as you built this eight figure business.

I'm assuming you came into a lot of different things that were changed within the model itself that you had to pivot, you had to turn, you thought you were going straight and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I need to pivot left because of X, Y and Z. Right. Maybe give some thoughts to how you handle change, how you become the change, or if you didn't see the change coming, how do you pivot and how do you maintain the progress?

I tend to see it in waves. Whereas there's an opportunity that's created, there's a wide open period where people have first mover advantage. Then there's a consolidation because you get price wars and you get people starting to look exactly the same. But here's what happens. When that tends to consolidate, another door opens up and then it becomes first mover advantage. Who can go in that direction? For example, when I got into the Amazon game or the physical products game, it was about who could take the best selling widget, the best selling water bottle, get it up on Amazon as quickly as possible, get reviews and sell a ton of that product. And then that was a wide open west period. And people were like, I'm selling a thousand water bottles a day. And somebody else came in and said, I can sell a thousand water bottles a day for 50 cents less than you can. And it became now the consolidation of all these people driving down profit margins. What I see now and what I think is happening is what that does is it opens up this window of I have a $50 water bottle. It's the best frickin water bottle you've ever seen. It's brands, it's more. It's not just somebody selling water bottles, it's somebody who sells the water bottle for this type of person and they develop a product line for that specific type of person. That is the opportunity. Whereas just selling water bottles, it's hard to be a water bottle company. Guess what other products you can sell if you're water bottle company. I'll give you 30 seconds. Actually, I'll give you five seconds and I'll list all the products that you can sell besides water bottles. If you're called water bottle company. Are you ready? In five seconds I'm going to list them off. Here we go.

Go.

That's all the products that you can sell that are not water bottles if you're water bottle company, but if you are Water Sports Inc. You can now sell water bottles, swim gear, activewear. You can sell all of these tiny brands to this audience and that's a sellable business.

Yep.

So when. So you get this wide open opportunity, then it consolidates and then some other wide open opportunity opens up and it becomes who can zig while everybody else is zagging. It's that, it's that model from who Moved my Cheese. That old book. Does that make sense? Yeah, I just cut out.

You cut out a little bit, but it was, it wasn't terrible.

Okay, well the whole point was go wherever the cheese is and there's, there's always money being exchanged.

Yeah.

And when and when markets consolidate, there tend to be other cheeses that are untapped in other areas. And I think the people who move into those quickly get first mover advantage. And you constantly need to be finding those zigs and zags.

You couldn't have said it better. There's always a way. And you have to be the person that's able to look at a different avenue of doing the exact same thing. To your point, if everyone's selling water bottles, how do you become the best water bottle seller? Well, maybe you out price them, meaning increase your prices because people will find the value in paying. Right. At the end of the day, is.

First class, ultimately $1,000 better than a business class? Maybe, maybe not. But at the end of the day, you have the convenience.

It's better.

It's viewed as better. Can you buy a Honda or a Mercedes? It's basically the perception of that. It's so much more expensive. It's got to be way better. Well, they both get you from A to B. They both are water bottles. One's $50, one's $1.50. At the end of the day, people will buy it. Like me. I am your target. I will buy the $50 water bottle over the $1.50 every time. I will buy Lululemon versus going to Kmart to buy a shirt. Right. That is me. That's who I am. And there's a perceived value in that. Right. And so that's a great argument to be made. I mean, it's. Change is coming at all times.

And you have to be.

You have to be the change, no matter what industry you're in, no matter what's going on with the economy. I'm sitting here and I'm traveling right now. I'm at my family's house. I'm in Marin County, California. 10 minutes north of us is Sonoma County, Napa county, and it is literally burning down. I have very, very close friends that have lost everything in the last 48 hours. Their houses, their cars, their businesses, their offices. They didn't do anything different. They didn't do it. But now they're on their heels. But they have to be able to pivot, right? They have to be able to make a change of what they do day to day, how they run their businesses. They're all entrepreneurs. How are they gonna keep going? So I think it's something that, whether it's a natural catastrophe, whether it's the economy, whether it's simply the industry, right? Like I think Amazon in your world is gonna change how you already were doing your business. They will no longer allow that at some point and you are gonna have to change on the dime. It'll be overnight. They're gonna say, you know what, let.

Me give you a glimpse into the future here. You're aware that Amazon just made a major acquisition, right?

Who did? I think so, maybe not.

Yeah, they bought Whole Foods.

Yes. Okay.

I was worried for 13 some billion dollars cash, right. So Whole Foods now owned by Amazon.com John Mackey spoke at, he was the founder of Whole Foods, spoke at one of our events last year. He's a friend of mine. And Amazon.com has all these distribution centers all over the country and now they own a major retail chain. So this is what I think is going to happen over the next couple of years. You have a food product that you launch on Amazon.com you're selling 500 units a day because you did some marketing rights. Amazon looks at that and says, where are all the buyers? There's a high concentration of them in Florida, in southern Florida. They're really buying a lot of these new gluten free chips, send them into Whole Foods.

Right.

And now you're gonna walk into retail stores and not even have done anything. And because you were a good marketer on the Internet, because you were on Amazon, you're now in Whole Foods across the country. And I don't think Amazon's done, I mean, wait for them to buy TJ Maxx and Kmart and open up their own Amazon Express stores as well. And now you have distribution of any product you want in the world. That's the type of change that is coming to the retail world and in the consumer products goods world. That's why they're buying these types of companies that are being built and sold by people like me. Because they're trying to be ahead of that curve. They're trying to be ahead of the change that is already happening. They're buying up little brands like mine because they see all that expansion that is happening. So if you can't be the change by the change, because the change is going to happen one way or the other.

Couldn't agree more, dude. Couldn't agree more. So I think, you know, no matter whether you're in a physical product world, whether you're in real estate, I don't. Whatever you're doing right now, I know I have a lot of real estate listeners here obviously for real estate investing, but Ryan is hitting it right on the head, is you have to be prepared. But not only be prepared, that's just the first step of it. You need to be able to start to create it and be the visionary who puts forth the change, no matter the industry, so that you can actually withstand that change. But not only withstand the change, better yet, be better, be bigger. It's something that I'm kind of passionate about right now because I think a lot of people out there in the world are so fearful, scared, intimidated, insecure to put themselves out there and go for it. And I want you and I want me and I want so many other people who have a presence to help get these people going, to help get them off their butts, to keep going, to start what you want to be started, go after and make the choices and be able to, how did you put it? Not make the choice, but you are.

Make the trade.

Make the trade.

Right.

And I think that's, that's what I really want to get out of this is you are so uber successful in the space that you are in. I mean you are widely known as the guy, your space. Right. And so that's why I definitely thought it'd be great for people to hear you.

I give away the seven figure model over at capitalism.com or my podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane where I teach the model of building million dollar businesses utilizing Amazon.com using Amazon's fulfillment center. So you just create the brand. It's a sellable business and I give away that because I want more deal flow. I want more entrepreneurs with a big vision in my back pocket so that we can do roll ups together and we can do big deals together. I have bought one, two, I bought three of our students businesses. So like I actually, I believe in this model so much sometimes my students start a business, go through our process and then I acquire the businesses cause I eat my own cooking because I am literally putting my money where my mouth is. So I believe in this model. I believe that entrepreneurs are the greatest solution that we have to the world's problems. And I think we need as many entrepreneurs as possible. So I teach this at my podcast. It's called Freedom Fast Lane and we just create the container for entrepreneurial magic.

Love it dude, love it. If you are out there listening to this and you want to know more, he just gave you his podcast. You guys need to get a hold of Ryan. I mean I'm being dead honest. The reason why he's here is to provide value for you. Go to capitalism.com I mean whatever you can get from this man, you need to be getting because you're 30. You just turned 30.

Just turned 30. Yes.

And you just sold and cashed an eight figure check. Personally, do you think Ryan knows some stuff that you guys might want to know? Probably. Probably. So dude, really appreciate your time. I know you're massively busy but you've been able to make a choice and come and join me here and I really appreciate that. And I know my listeners do too, man. I really do.

Justin, thank you for creating more entrepreneurs in the world. Thank you for teaching people how to be wealthy. We need more wealthy people in the world. You're the best shot that we have and making this world a better place. So it's a privilege to be in front of you today. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it, dude. Alright guys, that's it for our episode. I will see you guys on the next one.

Hey guys. Tyler, again, if you'd like to learn more about Ryan's eight figure model, check out freedomfastlane. Com. Thanks for listening.