Tariffs, Stock Market Crashes, & Recessions: What We Are Doing Right Now

Hi everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Special shout out to those of you who have been listening since the Freedom Fast Lane days. You are my favorite. So we got some things going on in the world. A this might be the most uncertain time that I have seen in my career since probably Covid so five years. This is a pretty uncertain time and it's a big deal for those of us who are in E commerce and those of us who are investors. So today I'm going to share with you how we are handling the uncertainty inside of our portfolio. I'll tell you what we are doing about tariffs, what we are doing about price hikes. I'm also going to share with you a resource that you will probably find very helpful. It is a company we work with that is able to navigate the tariffs in a really creative way. So stay tuned for that. I'm also going to share with you how I am handling this. As an investor. I I will share with you my strategy for dealing with this uncertain time. I'm also going to share with you the 10 stocks on my watch list. Please note, this will not be investment advice. I'm just sharing with you the strategy that I am following. So let's dive in. First, I wanna talk about how we approach these times of uncertainty. It came up on a coaching call inside of the 1% with one of our members who was considering completely changing the selling strategy that he had to to navigate the uncertainty of tariffs. And I told him, now is not the time to reinvent your strategy. Now is not the time to completely abort the thing that got you to this point and try something new. You don't want to reinvent how you are doing business. Instead, during times of uncertainty, I think it is more important to double down on the habits that you know, work. What are those habits? They look really boring. They look like getting reviews, being good to your customers, building your audience and selling lots of stuff. It means raising your prices. It means positioning yourself as a premium brand. It means doing the stuff that will work 10 years from now and worked 10 years ago. It's not sexy. It's not a new whiz bang strategy. It's doubling down on the habits that got you to this point and that will continue to work for many years to come. You know, there are times that I feel the chaos and I want to cling to some sort of new approach or someone else's certainty in order to feel better about the state of things and I remind myself that I cannot control the economy I cannot control the stock market. I cannot control my competitors. But the things that I can control are the things that determine the outcome of my life. I can determine what time I wake up in the morning. I can control what I put in my body. I can control how I show up to record a piece of content. I can decide how to treat my customers. I can decide what marketing strategy I'm going to follow. And these are the things that ultimately control my life. They are not the things like tariffs and economic setbacks because people win in all scenarios. It is the things that I show up and do every single day. So when I felt scared a couple of days ago with the stock market and free fall, it was a reminder to me, hey, are you following your habits? Are you following your tribe? 5 Are you blocking out your most important work? Are you building deep relationships with strategic partners? Are you waking up early and going and working out? Are you feeding your brain? Are you creating content? It's going back to those habits that allows me to stay on track, especially when times feel chaotic. With that in mind, let's let me tell you how we are addressing this within our portfolio. First of all, we are looking at adjusting pricing because right now the tariffs and the increased cost of goods that will result are going to hit cheap brands the hardest. Now would be a really good time to consider repositioning yourself as a more premium brand. Most people are going to try to offset their costs by by negotiating with suppliers by raising their price a dollar or two or cutting costs in other places. That's what cheap brands do. If you're a premium brand, the cost hikes that will come from tariffs are not going to affect you nearly as much. So if you've got 50% margin, you can absorb a hit to your cost of goods sold. You can't do that if you're a cheap brand that is selling to a mass market. So now's a really good time to explore repositioning yourself as a premium brand. Can you be the most expensive brand in your space while everybody else is competing to be $28 to $25? Can you carve out the part of the market that sells for 60 or $70? Most of the time there is room for a premium brand and now would be a good time to explore that. The second thing to know right now is that now is a good time to negotiate with your suppliers. We renegotiate our terms with our suppliers about once a quarter, definitely a few times per year, and all of your manufacturers and suppliers are going to expect you to be negotiating with them right now. Do not disappoint them. Now is the time to open up those conversations. And to illustrate this, let me tell you a story about an influencer who is in my network during COVID One of my friends who has a very large following saw a decline in his business just like everybody did during COVID And during that time a very smart physical products brand, they sold supplements, contacted him and and offered to do a two year contract with my friend and he eagerly took the deal. The thing was, the deal was significantly below his previous rate, but he took the deal because he was kind of spooked about business who wasn't during COVID and as a result he got a little bit of security knowing that he was gonna get cash flow from this supplement company that wanted to sponsor his content. But what the supplement company got was a two year deal at a discounted rate with an influencer who is up and coming and was about to go boom. It was a very lucrative deal for the supplement brand. The reason I tell you this is because during times of uncertainty, it's a really good opportunity to negotiate longer term deals with people that you want to do business with. This includes manufacturers and suppliers and this could also include influencers, affiliates or other partners that you might want to do long term business with. Now is a good time to lock in some discounted rates for people that you want to work with for a long time. So that starts with your suppliers and remember your suppliers have margin so they are expecting to eat into that a little bit in order to offset the increased costs of goods that they'll have to pass on to you because of tariffs. They will eat part of that so that you don't have to absorb all the additional costs. You will also pass on some of the cost to your customers in the form of increased pricing. I predict that about half of the tariffs will be absorbed by suppliers and half will be offset with a couple dollars increase in pricing. And as a result, the increased expenses can be passed off and not upset your profit margin. Number three, right now we turn everything into a promotion. That means that we will do price hikes and announce it to our customers. We will give them a reason to buy right now. We will honor our existing pricing and and tell them that there are price hikes coming because we do expect increased cost of goods. We like to turn every piece of bad news into a reason for a sale. It is a great opportunity to get customers or followers to buy from us for the first time or put us on subscribe and save or to buy bundles or to buy new products that they haven't tried before. Last minute deals, meaning right before a price hike is the best time to get new customers to try your products. So we turn opportunities like this into reasons for a sale. And what happens when we get more sales? We have more opportunities to get reviews, more opportunities to have positive interactions with our customers, get feedback and endorsements and turn that into content. I like to use every opportunity to do a promotion and and interact with our customers. And tariffs and price hikes and stock market crashes are good opportunities to do that. And finally, keep in mind that all of your competitors are going to be resting on their laurels right now. Your competitors will be cutting back on their pay per click spend. Your competitors will be thinking about selling their company at a discount. The influencers you want to work with are a little bit afraid that their revenue is going to go down. So this is the time to be aggressive. When everybody else is resting or scared, that is the time to pounce. This is the time that I might knock on the doors of some of my competitors and see if they want to exit. This might be the time that I would reach out to people and look at cross promotions or affiliate promotions. This is the time that I might look at being even more aggressive with pay per click spend because I know everybody else is going to be running for the gates. So I look at times like this as times to be aggressive because everybody else is going to be spooked. So we doubled down on our plan. We look to position ourselves as a premium brand. We offset the cost by negotiating with our suppliers and raising our prices. We turn everything into a promotion and we're aggressive when everybody else is scared. I want to give you one very tactical thing that you can do. And this is not a paid endorsement, but I am an investor in this company. I invested last year with a company called Sellerplex. Sellerplex does inventory management and supply chain for the brands that we invest in and some of my internal companies and they have some creative ways that they can get around tariffs. Like they can ship to other countries and then important to the United States in order to reduce the tariff costs. They also have experienced people who can negotiate with suppliers and get better terms. They also have a way to combine freight forwarding in order to save on shipping costs. So that can offset some of the increased cost of goods as well. I would recommend that you go to sellerplex.com and have a conversation with somebody. If you're doing at least about $50,000 a month. If you're not there yet, then this is probably overkill for you. You should just keep focusing on selling more stuff. But if you're at 50k a month and up, go over there and book a call with somebody and just have a conversation and see if you might be able to save some costs. Once again, not a paid endorsement, but I am an investor in that company and we do a lot of work together. We do a lot of business with Sellerplex. Okay, Now I want to talk to you about the investing side of things. What moves do we make right now? Do we buy the dip? Do we be a little bit more conservative? I can't tell you what you should do with your money, but I will tell you what I am going to do with my money. First, let me tell you a quick story that happened earlier. Last month I went on a five day vacation in which I had no screens, I had no text messages, no emails, no tv, no nothing, didn't look at a single screen for five days. And during that time, the stock market went way up one day and it went way down one day. And when I checked in five days later, I looked at the stock market and realized that it was exactly flat from when I left for vacation. So I missed the big swings up and the big swings down and all the drama that happened in between. It made me wonder what would have happened if I had turned off the news when Covid happened and I didn't turn it back on for two years and I would have just seen the market exactly where it was prior, actually higher than it was pre Covid, and I would have missed all the drama in the markets if I had just done nothing. I would have not been so stressed and I actually would have come out ahead. That's kind of how I approach this current downturn, except that I'm being a little bit more aggressive in what I am buying. So my strategy overall when it comes to investing is that every month I put at least $10,000 into index funds. It's something I have to do because I've proven to myself that I can be an idiot. And if I do too many things, I will complicate it and I'll lose a bunch of money or I have lost a bunch of money. So I make the commitment that every year I invest at least 100 to $150,000 into long term S&P 500 index funds. Because if I do that for 40 years, it compounds into $100 million. So that box is checked. Now I'm freed To go kill it in business. I have a lot more financial peace knowing that the base of my strategy will likely compound into $100 million in my lifetime if I just do the very plain, simple thing of putting 100 to $150,000 a year into long term index funds. So I'm continuing to do that and I might make additional allocations, meaning I might make two allocations into index funds this month because the market's down. But I am not going out and taking all my savings and dumping it into the market. I can't call the top, I can't call the bottom. So I'm going to continue to dollar cost average to into long term index funds that I don't plan to touch for decades. Number two, I keep a list of stocks that I'm interested in that I'm waiting to go on sale. And I'm starting to freshen up on those stocks to see if they might be cheaper than they're worth. So once every three to four years, one or two of these stocks may go below their market value. And right now I'm seeing a bunch of them that may be below market value. I'm not telling you what you should buy. This is not financial advice. But I'm going to tell you the top 10 on my watch list. Right now I'm looking at Alibaba, PayPal, Bank, OZK, Pepsi, Pfizer, Target, CubeSmart, Zoom, Google and Apple. These are all companies that I would like to own for a very long time that I am now doing more research into to see if it's a good time to buy. And if it is, then I will put some of my savings or some of my dry powder into these stocks and plan to hold them for at least 10 years. If I am not willing to hold something for at least a decade, then I probably shouldn't buy it. So that's how I approach it. I look at dollar cost averaging into the S&P 500 index funds and I do that every single month. I will likely make an additional allocation this month because stocks are cheaper. And I'm looking at taking some of my dry powder, some of my savings and looking at which of these stocks on my watch list might be below market value. And after I do my research and looking at their cash flows, I might put it into two or three of them. That's my approach. And none of that is going to compromise my long term plan. None of that is going to compromise how I sleep at night. None of that is going to deviate from my Strategy. The only thing that shifts is that I am moving along my strategy a little bit faster while the market is down. I'm not planning on putting everything in. I'm not planning on taking anything out. I am just making a few additional allocations that I would like to make anyway. I might have saved them for the end of the year. I'm doing them now while stocks are on sale. I am sticking to this plan because I committed to this plan before things were uncertain. I made my financial plan and my business plan when I felt stable, when things felt predictable. And now that things are not predictable or stable, I'm sticking to the plan because I was in a better frame of mind before. I got a little bit spooked. That's how I like to approach things. I am building long term plans in my businesses three, four, five years and I'm building very long term plans with my investment strategy. Three, four, five decades. And the only changes that that I am making to that approach is that I might be moving a little bit faster right now as a result of things being a little bit on sale. That's my approach. Now that you know my approach and my strategy, let's predict the future. Are tariffs going to be good or are they the crazy decisions of a buffoon? I have no idea. Is this the bottom of the stock market or are we about to crash even further? I have no idea. I am sticking to the plan regardless. I have lost so much money trying to predict the future. I have lost so much opportunity reacting to the moment. I have lost so much money and sleep and joy by trying to understand what's really going on behind the curtain. I used to fall into those traps and they made me unhappy and they kept me on the sidelines from being aggressive in my business. After going through that cycle a few times and seeing that the people who stayed calm in the chaos were the people who let us out of it, I decided that I no longer had any benefit trying to judge whether this policy was going to be good for my business or bad for my life. And I no longer would try to catch the bottom of the market or try to sell when the market was at the top. I needed a strategy for my business that would work for a decade and I needed an investment plan that would work for my entire life. I had to get burned a bunch of times in chaotic times in order to develop a strategy that I feel good about in good times and bad times. And I hope that you can use this as an example to carve out a strategy that is the same for you. Because once I felt good about my long term strategy and was able to ignore the news or the predictions of other people, I finally started to feel some financial peace. Even after I sold a company for millions of dollars and had more money in my bank account than I knew what to do with, I still felt scared about money because I didn't feel like I could predict the future. I didn't know where to put my money to protect my wealth and that made me feel insecure. Well, guess what? No one can predict the future and no one knows what is going to happen to the economy or their investments. It wasn't until I developed a plan for my businesses and my investments that I started to feel like I could feel safe and I could do good work that would last in good economies and bad economies. So I made my plan before the uncertainty. I will continue it after the uncertainty and into the next bull run. I will say however, that I think there's going to be some interesting opportunities to buy companies from founders who are scared right now. And I think the competition in E commerce is and a lot of digital businesses is real bad right now, meaning there is so much market share available. I ran the numbers on one of my products and.

At sheer strength we sell a nitric oxide supplement and I currently does like 25 sales a day and that's a good start, but it's nothing. So I want to 10x those sales and I looked at my competitors and was like, I wonder if any of my competitors are selling 250 units a day. And I found one of my competitors and I put it into one of those free estimator tools that tells you how much revenue it's making. And I saw that that competitor was selling a thousand units a day. And the crazy thing was they weren't even the biggest competitor. I found three more competitors that were selling even more than them and I went holy crap Ryan, you are thinking way too small. And then I realized I've been freaking out about the stock market when I could be putting all of my attention into taking a product to a thousand sales a day. I'm worried about tariffs when I could have one product doing $40,000 a day in sales. I'm worried about downturns in the economy when there are competitors selling products that aren't even as good as mine and they're marketers and I know I'm better than them and they have $30 million companies and my company right now is a $2 million run rate. Of course my Company is only a year old since we rebuilt it, but still I'm thinking so small. I'm putting my attention on things I can't control when I could be putting my attention into things that are multi eight figure businesses. Why would I worry about a 20% drop in the S&P 500 when I could be having a business with several products doing a thousand sales a day? That's the approach that I'm taking into this uncertainty. And if you need to be around a room of killers of people who are doing it, people who are building multimillion dollar businesses, I'd invite you to join our community@capitalism.com 1capitalism.com the number one that is our mentoring community for entrepreneurs on the road to 1 million. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com just so you know, we're going to be releasing the new format of the show coming up here in about a week and a half, maybe two weeks. So stay tuned for that. I'll see you guys on the next episode. Take care.

Yeah. So I'm realizing like, man, I'm a fireman, but like what am I leaving for my family? I was looking at my retirement, like I'm going to get 60% retirement. I got to become an entrepreneur, man. Like otherwise I'm leaving, I'm leaving a lot on the table, man. As soon as that, the opportunities to join the incubator, it was like no question. And now I know that feeling like when it's time to invest in something, it's time to invest in something. That shift in mindset of being around these people that are playing this game elevated my expectations for myself to such a high level that like now I have zero roof of what I've doing been believe I'm capable of. You know, it's like in this community there's this give and give and give and everyone's just giving back to each other, right? And everyone's giving back to each other and everyone's making more money and everyone's being more successful and they're just giving back to each other. And that's the game, like who can give the most? And I'm taking everything I'm learning from the incubator and I'm starting to use it in my business now. And all of a sudden I'm, you know, like a year later, I'm driving down the road and I look at my wife, I was like, holy whit. I was like, I'm a entrepreneur.

When I joined the incubator, I had my belief and my trust. All this takes faith. You have to take a step forward. In the dark, you're going to get nowhere. So stay stuck or just make a move. So don't sit on the fence. Stop being a fence sitter. Make a move. Either. Either get out of here or make a move. You get the right coaches in place and the right people around you. I mean, it's just inevitable if you do the work. So man, capitalism.com and Ryan Moran has been just an integral part of my growth and it's been amazing. So thank you.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do with over at capitalism. Com Inc. That's capitalism. Com Inc.