#TBT — Ryan Moran: From Lost And Broke To My First Exit

The numbers that we're talking about or the idea of $100 million plan. It's an ambitious goal that isn't impossible, isn't even the right word. It's totally feasible once you realize the people who have already done it because they're not all that special. Whatever level of success that you want to attain is just a matter of the right strategy with the right habits. You don't even have to be great. You just have to be kind of good and following the right strategy to get there.

Hey, in traditional Throwback Thursday fashion, we're re releasing one of our most popular episodes that we've had on capitalism dot com. Enjoy.

Hey, Podcast Ryan here. We're about to share a Throwback Thursday episode. This is an episode that I got a lot of really positive feedback from the Start From Nothing podcast, and it's with my good friend Andy Drish.

Sam.

Since this podcast episode, he and I have become like brothers. We're really, really close now. And in this episode, he was interviewing me about my journey as an entrepreneur. And the feedback that I got from it was that I very rarely tell my story in this type of a format. So I know some of you have been following me for a long time and probably have never heard the full scoop of growing up as a broke kid from Cleveland. Some of you know I went to.

School to be a pastor.

I figured this game out, and sometimes I forget that. For those of you who are first starting out, you might see where we are now or where I am now or where other entrepreneurs are now and forget that. Gosh, we're all figuring this thing out. And I started from nothing, and I still make mistakes, and I made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. And so this interview is a really cool recap of my journey from nothing to all the way to my first exit, and then what comes next.

I hope you enjoy.

Today I'm going to be joined by my buddy Andy Drish from the foundation and the Start From Nothing podcast.

And today, Andy is going to grill me about my plan to getting to $100 million. I have a plan in place that I expect is going to take me from having run a $10 million business to having $100 million business of taking my net worth from $10 million to $100 million. And we're gonna look at exactly what that plan is, and we're going to detail it out in terms of how.

I plan to execute it.

We also talk about the dark side of entrepreneurship. We talk about the doubts that come up. We talk about dealing with them. We talk about should you deal with them. And as a result, you a little bit of a different side of me that I usually share publicly. One of the cool things about Andy.

Is he has a way.

Because I feel comfortable around Andy. We've been friends for several years now. He has a way of pulling out pieces of my story and my plan that I don't often share when I'm just shooting them into my microphone like I'm doing right now. Andy is a personal friend, and so he is uniquely qualified to be able to get me to open up. And so I share a little bit more detail about what my exact roadmap is to be. Not just a deca millionaire, but what is a hundo millionaire, or whatever it's called, a nine figure millionaire. And we'll talk all about that over the next 45 minutes or so. Just a fair warning, Andy doesn't shy away from profanity. So if you're in the car with kids, you might want to go listen to a different episode. There's plenty of them out there. But if you want the detailed plan of how I plan to get to nine figures, this is going to reveal that path. So I hope you'll find it beneficial and I hope you'll enjoy this chat that I have with Andy Drish.

Yo, yo, yo, what's up, everyone? Andy Drish here coming at you from Boulder, Colorado. We just got six inches of snow, so it is freezing here. And I'm stoked to be on this podcast today because we have Ryan Daniel Moran coming back on the show for the second time. Ryan needs no introduction. He's the founder of capitalism.com. he has been on this show before. We got to talk about psychedelics and building Amazon businesses. And today we're going to be talking about Ryan's plan to build $100 million business. Now, normally I would say something like that and be like, oh, a plan, Great, let's talk about a plan. But the fact is, Ryan, you're not even 30 years old yet, are you?

I just turned 30.

Yeah, you just turned 30. Welcome. Welcome to adulthood.

It feels great.

It's a great decade.

So he just turned 30 and, you know, I think just before your birthday, he exited a company for over eight figures. So when Ryan talks about building a nine figure plan, this doesn't just seem like a whimsical plan that somebody's thrown together. This is something that is has been intelligently thought through. And I'm stoked to have him on because, you know, you You've. You've made countless millionaires. Well, maybe count four. How many? Do you know the number?

A few hundred.

So few hundred.

I don't know the exact number. So we could call it countless. That would look great on a sales page.

But the number actually is a few hundreds. Yeah, few hundred. A good number of eight figure businesses has come out of his program. And, you know, I think you're really going to be a leader of our generation of entrepreneurs. You already are.

Thank you.

And so for those of you listening, I think this is going to be a phenomenal episode. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me, dude. It's good to be back. And if I could like drop one truth bomb just to kick things off. The thing that I have noticed as I have gotten older into my 30th year.

Is like, the more I get to the level of success that as a kid I perceive to be impossible, the more I realized that the people at the top are just people, and some of them aren't even good. You don't really even have to be good. You just have to be better than most. And most people aren't good. So the idea of the numbers that we're talking about or the idea of $100 million plan is it's an ambitious goal that isn't impossible, isn't even the right word. It's just like it's totally feasible once you realize the people who have already done because they're not all that special. And the same is true at whatever level of success that you want to attain. It's just a matter of the right strategy with the right habits. And again, I hate to repeat myself, but you don't even have to be great. You just have to be kind of good and following the right strategy to get there.

Yeah, and the blueprint seems relatively similar. Like if you want to go to six figures, it's four. Find somebody, learn from them, figure out what they're doing, emulate it. And you're just doing it at a much bigger level with a couple more zeros maybe.

But I don't think of it that way. How do you think of it? I don't. It is more that I have given myself permission or given myself the, like, you can do it, buddy. Enough to be able to go after goals that my brain says are impossible. And then once you reach the halfway point, you're like, oh, this isn't impossible at all. I can go further.

So let me dig into that. How are you able to cultivate that sense of almost priming your brain to accept the goals that you want to set two ways.

One.

I just think the brain is a normalizing machine. So here, for example. Andy, do you know that in China 30 million people live in caves?

I did not know that.

True, true fact. 30 million people in China live in caves. Now, that seems super weird to us. 30 million people.

How many?

That's a lot of people.

Yeah, it's a lot of people. That's what, five New Yorks or three New Yorks. And they live in caves. So the fact that they live in caves is totally normal to at least 25 million people. Maybe there's 5 million people going, it's kind of weird that we live in caves and it's 2017. But the fact of the matter is, to tens of millions of people, it's totally normal to live in caves and, like, be stoked about having fire. And our brains just normalize whatever is around us. So if you are constantly surrounded by DECA millionaires who are miserable, there's a really good chance that you're gonna be worth $10 million, but also be unhappy with your life. If you live in a place where most people are married, you're probably going to think it's normal for everyone to be married. And if you think it is normal to live in caves in a baboon structure where there's one alpha male and a bunch of females, that you're probably gonna normalize that your brain will normalize whatever it's surrounded with all of the time. So whatever your goal is, the idea here is to pound your brain, to normalize that. And you can do that through audiobooks, podcasts, and who you surround yourself with. And your brain is wired to normalize the tribe. So whatever you're around all the time, you will just make normal. So that is the first way. The second way is more of an individual thing for me. And it's just that when I reach a certain level of success, someone in my brain says, oh, okay, I guess we are capable of this. A new level unlocked. Let's do it again. So I think very 0 to 1, 1 to 10, 10 to 50, 50 to 100. I think in steps. I wish that I could just hack it and go straight for the billion. And I probably could, but I guess I just haven't given myself that permission yet to be able to do that. But I think very linearly and very step by step, and so I tend to go in those individualized chunks. So once I've reached the seven figure mark, it's easy for me to teach that to someone and also duplicate that in my own business, and I don't want to settle for something less than that.

Great.

That's how I do it.

If somebody's listening to this and they want to build a six or seven figure business, one of the first things is start hanging out with people who are already building those businesses. You know, it's so fascinating when you start doing that. And I think moments that have been really impactful for me are when people. People open up underneath the hood, so to speak, of their business. And then you actually start seeing everything from the inside. And you're like, oh, this isn't. This isn't so crazy.

Right?

And they're not so special and they're not so. Exactly. They just kind of did something that works enough to get it to where they want to be and that's it.

I think they're. You know, I really like the quote from Jim Rohn where he says, success is the product of the person that you become. But I also kind of think there's something to the fact of you're already good enough. There are people way less smart than you who have done what you want to do. And they didn't have any superpowers, they just did it. And once you get under the hood, you realize there's nothing really magical to it. Like you're already good enough and you're already ready. It's just a matter of following the right strategy and practicing the right habits. And I find when I'm helping entrepreneurs, 80% of my work, 80% of my job is telling them to just stay on track. It's kind of like being a personal trainer. It's no, you should not switch from this diet to this diet this week because you read about it on a blog post. It is about staying the course.

Stick with it.

All diets work, all workouts work if you do them long enough. Same with.

Yes.

We talk a little bit about how this led you to build Capcom and what that is and why. Why Capcom is quickly becoming kind of like a. It's almost becoming an industry standard event.

It's a cult is what it is.

Yeah, it's definitely. It's a good cult.

So, I mean, I know how many events there are in the world and I know the commitment it take to give up three days of your life to travel to a different city and go to an event. And I don't always like doing that. And three years ago, I just decided that I would build my own. I build the one that I wanted to go to. And what I did was, you know, my dream as an entrepreneur is to buy the Cleveland Indians. This is what my goal is. So I have a loose. Three years ago, I had a very loose idea of how I was going to get there. But I needed the help of mentors and coaches to be able to think at the level that I needed to think in order to tackle that. So I hired Gary Vaynerchuk, I hired Robert Herjfeck, I hired Jeff Hoffman, who's on the founding board of priceline.com I just hired a bunch of people who had built businesses or networks that would allow them to do something like that. And I flew them in and called it an event.

And I invited my audience to join me. And while I was sitting on stage with Gary Vaynerchuk, he said one thing that was like, I was like, thank you, I got my piece, I got like the thing I needed. And he said his plan to buy the New York jets, which is his dream as an entrepreneur, is to double down on his singular skill, which is branding, to build a business that completely supports that. And one day he will be in the position and the network to be able to take that skill and leverage it to acquire and build a billion dollar company. And I was like, thank you.

Got it.

I'm good, we can all go home now. And that was day one of the event. And the reason why that was so impactful for me was someone in my brain said, okay, identify what my singular skill is and identify how we could build a structure around that to build a multi hundred million dollar portfolio business so that when the time comes, I can leverage that network and that skill set to go acquire or to be a part of a really big business that will get me my Cleveland Indians. And I have spent the last two years building that. And every year we have a December event called the Capitalism Conference where we repeatedly bring in the entrepreneurs who have built eight and nine figure companies and we just download their playbook and give it to the audience. So the playbook to building billion dollar companies, playbook to taking a company from zero to eight figures in a couple of years and we just bring in those entrepreneurs. I consider it my job to distill the playbook and take that step by step, linear fashion and deliver it to the audience so that if somebody is building their first million, they'll leave with that. If they're scaling their marketing and sales to go from seven to eight, we can do that. Or if they're investing into companies or building a team or they're investing for passive income so that they can have their lifestyle dialed in while they build their companies. We bring in those kind of step by step pieces because I want them and I know that people who come to capcon want them as well.

Nice man. What I love about your event is that so many events I go to and I don't actually listen to the content. I just sit outside and hang out with my friends. But what's so unique about your event is because you're putting the event on in some ways for your own sense of learning. The content is phenomenal. It's so fun to be a part of.

Thanks. Anybody can like take social media experts and put them on stage and call it an event.

Totally.

And that's not what I'm into. Like if that's what this is about, let's all go home. We have better things to do. If we're not creating some sort of an up level for myself and for my community and everybody who joins, then we're just another event like everybody else. And I, like, I have a two year old I'd rather spend time with than do something that everybody else is doing. It's just there's no money in events. I don't know if people know this. The reason why we do it is because it's, it's the hardest thing, the most expensive thing and the best thing that we do@capitalism.com in my opinion. Yeah. And I committed to it. I don't do anything without a long term commitment to it. And I committed to do this for, for five years. And every year it has been like an exponential up level for myself and my community.

Can you tell me how you don't commit to anything unless you're committed for the long term?

Sure. So I run a podcast called Freedom Fast Lane and most people will launch a podcast, get a bunch of subscribers, get all excited, lose passion over it and then it dies. And then they go build another half built bridge and I just decide that I'm not going to get into anything unless I'm willing to commit to it for a year plus before I evaluate the bridge result. So for example, I hired a full time videographer earlier this year. He's been with me just over 90 days and his name is Chris. And Chris and I do a ton of video together to put content on the YouTube channel and to build up my personal profile to build up capitalism.com and somebody asked me, they're like, hey, so how has your life changed since you hired a full time Videographer. I said, ask me in nine months. And they said, why? I said, hasn't been a year yet. And I committed to regularly doing videos to build up my YouTube following and to build up my profile and to build up my Facebook audience before I evaluated the results. Otherwise it would be a waste of time and energy if I'm not willing to go into this for a year. So let's play with this for a second. Andy, how old are you going to be when you die?

Oh, probably like 126 or so.

Okay, 100. Awesome. So 126. Do you know what the average lifespan is right now?

85 or something?

Yeah, a little bit. A little bit less 80. Let's just go with 85. In most people's mind, most people who are not abundance minded, who don't realize that we're gonna have all kinds of technological breakthroughs that make 100 the new 60. Most people would say 85 is a full life. So how old are you now?

31.

Right. So 31. 126 minus 31. Is that 90?

95.

95. All right, so we could take your life 10 years from now and we could say, ah, we're gonna take a mulligan on the whole thing.

And you would still have an entire lifetime, 85 years to figure it out and get it.

Figure some shit out. It's like totally.

It's like you have day zero, day zero comes 10 years from now, and that's when your life begins and you have 85 years left. So if we think about that, I'm still in the mode of I'm willing to experiment and learn and punt the next 10 years of my life to be able to figure out the strategy that will take me to the goals that I want to achieve. So I consider myself.

Still a student at 30, figuring out the best strategies to put me on that path for the results that I want. So I am willing to not evaluate a result for a year to five years in order to get the strategy right. Does that make sense?

Mm, totally. Yeah. You're not worried about it's long term thinking versus short term. The immediate results don't, don't matter. It's all just hiccups. The real test comes after a certain period of time where you can allow the thing to actually, you know, you have so many, like there's moments of insecurity and does this work or does this not work? And you allow all of those to just go by the wayside by pushing off, actually measuring the results until a year or at least judging the results if it was a win or failure.

Yeah, I think that one of the key indicators of success is how long term are you willing to think.

Even.

Something as silly as I heard it once, that if you bought Coke stock and reinvested the dividends in 1890 and you put like I'm making up numbers but $1,000, you'd be a Deca millionaire today. Unfortunately, most people don't have 130 years to wait for their Coke stock to mature. But given enough time, just about even the smallest strategy like buy stock in Coke and reinvest the dividends creates exponential returns. So are you willing to, are you willing to commit to the timeframe that will give you the exponential return on whatever it is that you're diving into? And I think that's one of the things that we have sort of lost in our fast paced society is we're after those short term wins versus compounding something for 100%.

100%. You know the question I've been thinking about lately, and this is partially inspired by some of the work with Dan Sullivan, but the question I've been thinking about lately has been if I could build one business forever and I can't sell it and I can't retire from it, what does that business look like? And I think it's such good constraints because it forces you to not be like, okay, well I'm going to build this for like the next three years, but then I'm going to do what I actually want to do. I'm going to build it the way I want to build it. Then.

That's really dangerous when you're starting to ask that, because then it becomes all about the money, which I don't think is a bad thing. Like I think money is a great indicator of value and growth. But as human beings, when we start seeing the fuel as the, as the reward, we tend to burn out because we're not actually happy.

Because you're not enjoying the process of building.

Correct. So I'm like, I love money. My company is called capitalism.com. but I also know that we are human beings that need our reward centers gratified in order to produce the result that we want. And following the money does not always give the individual the reward in order to commit to the long term. If that happens.

Totally. So tell me.

I want you to start rolling out your roadmap for 100 million. What's that look like?

So.

So here's here. This was the brain gasm we would say that I had.

When I sold, the majority stake of my last business was watching how my new partners who acquired the business did it and how they thought and starting to analyze how really successful people were building a massive amount of wealth. So I'm gonna run a couple numbers by you. First of all, the acquiring company that acquired my business did it with little to no money out of their pocket and they installed an operating team in order to take over. So the.

Owners were literally owners. They were not operators, they were not buying a job, they were buying an asset and they were stepping out and going and buying another asset with other people's money. And that was their job, to basically deploy other people's capital to acquire businesses. Huh, this is interesting. Okay, so what would it look like if I could build $100 million business without having to be the centerpiece of it all? What would that look like? So now I have to think like an owner rather than thinking like an operator or even an entrepreneur. Even what we think of as an entrepreneur. And this was right around the time that Amazon bought Whole Foods. Now I'm standing here in Austin, Texas. Whole Foods is a few blocks from here. John Mackay, the founder, is an acquaintance of mine. And like the guy, I know John, I mean, I don't know John super well, but the founder of Whole Foods is like, if I email him, he'll email me back.

We have that type of an acquaintanceship. He helped me secure a couple people for the capitalism conference. And it's like John, who I hang out with once in a while, just sold his company to Jeff Bezos for $13 billion.

Okay, this is starting to get interesting. And I know that Jeff Bezos, that company was paid for immediately upon acquisition because of the stock. Like the stock price went up enough to pay for $13 billion valuation of whole Foods. So my brain is starting, is having to go out and get new thoughts about how I think about business and work and my relationship to it. Maybe it doesn't have to be all on me. Maybe I don't have to save enough money in order to start a big business. Maybe I don't have to be ultra protective of equity in a company. It would be better to have a small piece of a really big pie. And these are all the thoughts that I'm starting to process. And then I started to run some other numbers. Andy, I realized, okay, if you run a company that does has profit of a million dollars or less, you're probably going to sell that for one to three times your yearly earnings. When you cross the million dollar profit you are opened up to other types of buyers. More private equity groups are interested in you in that point. And so that company is going to sell for three to six on a really great day, six times profit. So same business, once it's over, that million dollar profit is now worth way more money even from a multiple standpoint. And if you cross $10 million in profit, then you are opened up to institutional buyers, strategic acquisitions. So you are now worth 8 to 12 times your profit. There are fewer companies to buy over that $10 million mark. Okay, interesting. Well, I've never built a company that did $10 million in profit. I've never, I've never done that before. But I have a lot of entrepreneurs in my network who have built companies that have done $2 million in profit. And there's this strategy called a roll up where you can package those companies together as long as they are complementary to one another or in similar verticals. You can roll them up and take five companies doing $2 million a year and now that's $10 million and that can be sold for a 10x multiple. That's $100 million exit. Right.

And that's simple math.

It's not complex to do that. Yep.

And I already know those people, so I'm starting. So in my mastermind we immediately shifted the focus of the focus being alright, we are now going to dial in on getting all of you to that one to $3 million a year mark in profit, which I know is going to take about an 8 to $10 million revenue.

And once we're there, we're going to take those of you have similar businesses, package them up and we're going to do roll ups together. Because I've already started to build the network of private equity groups and institutional buyers so I can now be the middleman between them. So this is one half of the strategy. The other half is I am acquiring businesses and I have built.

My entire business that I can't sell and I can't retire from, as you stated, is to put me in the position of deal flow. So when I talk about business@capitalism.com and I teach entrepreneurship on capitalism.com that puts me in a position to be in the middle of a lot of deal flow. So I teach the fiscal products model to entrepreneurs. Not because I love selling thousand dollars or $2,000 info courses. To me that doesn't even make me happy. What that does is it brings in a pipeline of entrepreneurs who I can now mentor and eventually either partner with or acquire their company as part of additional roll ups or as I buy these businesses to scale them. Just like the acquiring company invested in my business so that that could be scaled. So that's my play, if you will, is to.

Scale them.

And you've acquired a handful of companies over the past few months?

I have, yes.

Can you tell us about some of the deals and how you found them, what you looked for? What's the criteria that you're going after? How do you know if it's a good deal to acquire?

That's a great question. The first acquisition that I did this year was another physical products company. It's a company called Foxbrim. They were mostly based on Amazon.com they're in beauty and oil space. And my partner, his name is Clement, has a finance background. So part of his job was to go in, dive into the numbers. He calls it finding the story behind the numbers. So he's diving through the numbers and weaving a story together of what's working and what's not working. My job is to have this strategy for growing the business.

Together. We make a nice.

Who's your partner? Clement that does that. Is he the partner in Foxbrim or is he a partner that's in your other business that's helping with this?

No, he is my partner on the acquisition side of my business. So Foxbrim was our first acquisition. We have since done one additional acquisition and we have one or two kind that we're courting, if you will.

Did you pay cash for these or how did you structure the deal?

So for Fox Brim, we took on investors. So I have skin in the game, but I didn't. But we raised money from private investors. We basically put a syndication together like we put or a solicitation together, if you will, and shopped it to our network and we took on investors to pay the down payment and then we pay terms to the owner because he wanted a valuation that we weren't willing to pay. So the way that we bridged that gap was on terms. So we had a down payment and then there's future payments coming in order to get him the valuation that he wanted.

And how much of a down payment.

Are you putting down? It was less than 50%.

Less than 50%. It's still a pretty big down payment for.

So our job is to be able to grow the maintain and grow the business, to be able to pay our investors and to be able to scale it, to pay the old owner and have a profit. And it's taken us about six months to develop the foundation to be really scalable, there were a lot of things that needed to be buttoned up. You know how it is as an entrepreneur where you have success and it's really messy success. Totally. There's. There's a lot going on. And from the outside view, especially when you've done this before, you can go in and say, we need to clean up these things. And it's not sexy work. It is hard work. And it's not like. It is.

There is.

There is, like, no chorus cheering you on while you are doing that. And then six months later, you have something you can scale. And that's when everybody says, wow, you guys came out of nowhere. So it was our job to button it up, which took longer than we thought. And now we are starting to scale that, and we're really starting to hit pay dirt with that business, and we're really excited about it. And that's a model that we are duplicating over other brands that we will either start ourselves within those operations or we will use to acquire other businesses, acquire them, clean them up, and then scale them. And it's my job now to go build the network in retail, because I have products that have been in a thousand retail stores. It's my job to make the connections with private equity groups, which I'm already doing based on my sale and just being a part of masterminds. It's my job to stay on the cutting edge of strategy, to partner with influencers. It's my job to go beyond the cutting edge and bring that into the operations of the business, which is actually the job of every CEO and entrepreneur. It is to come up with the strategy and vision for the company and make sure you never run out of money and give the rest to your very talented team.

Did you run into any blind spots through this process? Or what were the things you're like, oh, shit, I didn't see that one coming.

How much time do you have?

So part of the reason why we decided to raise investor money was.

Two reasons. One, I had never done it before, so I took it on as a personal challenge, and it scared the living daylights out of me. Like, it scared the daylights out of me to raise money. A, because it's a big responsibility to be a steward of other people's capital. And also because just asking for that's a sale I've never asked for. And what I found was that it was actually. Once I got through my own junk, it was actually a very enjoyable experience. And the other side of this was we Wanted to build a network of people. We wanted to bolster our network of people who were in this with us. And once you have skin in a business.

You have an incentive for that business to grow and you get to benefit from other people's networks as well. But getting through my own personal junk was certainly a roadblock that I ran into. Another was right after we acquired it. We hit slow season and increased competition. And the mental noise that hit at that point was very self defeating. Yeah, it was, it was, it was very scary. And it was kind of a new level of your demons coming out.

What were the things you would think?

The things I would think?

Yeah, like what was the mental chatter that was going on?

A, I'm not good enough to be doing this. B, what have I done? C, I'm gonna have to pay my investors out personally and I'm gonna lose everything and be starting all over again. And I'm gonna have to work at Walmart. I'm gonna move back to Ohio. Everybody's gonna think I'm a failure, and no one's gonna want to work with me ever again. Like, normal stuff.

Totally.

And the reason, the reason I'm comfortable sharing that is because I. It, it's, it's very rare I have those thoughts. It's only like every other week, you know, that that comes up. Like, I think most people think that it's daily.

No, what I'm saying is I think most people have this perception of really successful people that the demons never come up. And what actually happens is the more you grow, the more they come up. I think Elon Musk has like tons of mental demons because his perception is probably all these people look up to me. If I fail, it's gonna be on a big stage. Everybody is gonna know about it and we all have them. And mine come up too. Like every other week. One week, I think everything I will touch will turn to gold. The next week, I think it is all gonna come crashing down and I'm gonna work at Walmart. The difference is I just keep following the strategy and keep moving forward. And I have learned that those, like, the good days aren't forever and the bad days aren't forever. And your internal junk doesn't mean anything about what is actually going on. There is what's happening and then there's the story that we put on it. There's also the story that other people put on it, which is usually, man, you're killing it. You're doing such a great job. I wish I was you. And inside you're freaking out.

And then by the time it was personal junk, and by the time you make it, you've already worked through all the personal junk. So then the accolades don't really matter because you're like, oh, you did such good. You're like, dude, you have no idea. This is ridiculous.

True.

And that's when they're like, you came out of nowhere. Yeah, no idea.

I did not come out of nowhere.

Nice, man.

So the model works, and you're reaching new levels of fear and discomfort and challenge, which is all a good thing. You've done this with a couple companies. You've got a couple more that you're courting right now. And then the future plan, it sounds like, is to acquire a handful of these companies that are in similar spaces and then eventually roll them all up into one big deal that you can sell.

Essentially, yes. So I'll modify this slightly.

One of the things that we're building out is, yes, we're acquiring these businesses. And part of what you acquire, when you acquire a business, is systems, network, buying power. There are certain assets that you acquire that are a little bit more intangible than just cash in and cash out.

We are building companies, we're launching businesses that are based around the assets of what we acquire. For example, a lot of our network and a lot of the businesses that we have a hand in right now are somewhere around health or healthy living. So it makes sense for the next business for us to either acquire or start to be something around health. So one of the things that we're kicking around right now is a couple of food brands. So we're working on a line of actually healthy chips. Not like fake healthy chips, but actually healthy chips. And we're starting to kind of kick that around. And we're going through different manufacturers and taking different samples, and we're looking at different profiles and different formulations, if you will. It feels weird to call food a formulation, but different combination of ingredients, Right? And based on that, we will launch that to the audiences and the customer list that we have in these other businesses. And one of them. One of them will hit paydirt and B, your quest nutrition that goes from zero to $500 million in four years. One of them. I don't know which one. I don't know which idea that I.

Have will hit it.

But if it's done in a way that builds asset upon asset upon asset, then it's only a matter of time before one of them. You really get it right.

And that's what I'm betting on, yeah, the exponential effect comes in as opposed to if you do one health and beauty, and then, you know, something in outdoor equipment and then something in sporting goods, and then, you know, something in dog toys where they're all disjointed. There's no exponential effect that actually happens.

There's no compounding. You are. You are taking your energy away from something that's doing $100,000, and you're putting it into something that's doing zero without any way to connect the two. And that is a problem, especially if your bandwidth is moving from one to another. Now, here's the caveat. I told you that the company that acquired my business, they. Well, they will indeed buy a business that is in this space, and then they'll acquire a business that is in a completely different space because they're not applying their bandwidth and they're not deploying their own capital. So they're building up a portfolio. And if they happen to cross against one another, awesome. They're thrilled with that.

But they're different than that because they've built the skill set to be able to do that. They build the skill set of being able to bring in the capital, deploy the management team, be owners. So it's not taking them more money, more energy. They're essentially doing a deal and then they're done. Is that. Is that what I'm hearing?

And that's the Warren Buffett model. I mean, Warren Buffett is one of the biggest shareholders in Coke.

And that does not affect the real estate business that he owns.

That does not change Berkshire Hathaway, except it's a name that can be applied to Berkshire Hathaway real estate. And if he invests in Apple, a bunch of people go into Apple, but they're not necessarily related to one another. He is an investor, and being an investor can be your business, and it is with a lot of private equity groups. So you can go into multiple different directions as long as your bandwidth and your capital, like the things that are not replaceable, are deployed and dispersed along multiple fields. So for me, I'm very protective of my bandwidth being linear and building upon one another. So that there is that exponential growth curve. Does that make sense? I used a lot.

Totally.

Words that might make me sound smart, but I don't know.

Totally makes sense.

Okay, good.

It makes. It makes a ton of sense to me. And guys, if you're listening to this, this is just a taste of what you're going to get if you guys come to capitalism. Capcom. Capcom you'll be there, Andy, right? I'll be there. I'll be there. I'm pretty sure I'll be there. Libby and I are doing an event in Nicaragua before.

What's the conversion rate when you say, I'm pretty sure I'll be there?

Well, I just have to make sure from a timing standpoint that this event doesn't overlap with it because we committed to doing a workshop in Nicaragua. Assuming it doesn't. I'm going to be there and I'm going to be listening to people like Kimball Musk and Daymond John and Russell Brunson and all of these other badass people who built huge ass businesses who I'm looking at the lineup here.

You know, I'll tell you who I am most excited about.

Yeah, who are you most excited?

It's a sleeper pick and it's Brian Lee.

Really?

Yeah. Brian Lee is the founder of the Honest Company. So Jessica Alba had the idea and when, apparently when you're a celebrity that sells physical products, the person you call is Brian Lee to be able to scale that. So Kim Kardashian also used him to found Shoedazzle and he was also one of the founders of LegalZoom. So he's a serial e commerce billionaire. And he has done this by being the operating partner behind these businesses. So he's the guy who actually builds them. He's the guy who's actually building out the strategy. So I'm fascinated to go, okay, like, Jessica Alba gets the accolades because she started the Honest Company. You're the one who actually built it. What's your playbook? How did we do this? Can you tell us what the team looked like when you started? What was your distribution plan? How do you take something as low margin as diapers and cleaning spray and turn it into a business that's valued at about a billion dollars? Walk me through that, please. And we're doing a fireside chat. So I'm sitting there. I'm just going to pull out as much playbook detail as I can. And so that's my sleeper pick. He's the one I'm most excited about.

Dude, I'm stoked to hear about that one. I think that could actually be a pretty potent model for what's happening. Where a typical model is, you have your visionary and integrator, the person who sees everything. You have the operator to make it happen. I think it could actually be three where you have the influencer who's like in front of the crowd doing everything. You have the person putting the deal and everything together and then you have the ops person behind it all. That sounds phenomenal man.

And I just want to be able to pull. I'm the visionary in that model that you just described. So as a visionary I want to grab all the integrators how to pieces so I can take it to my integrators and say here is your playbook. So if you're an entrepreneur who is a visionary then the best thing you can do is go download the strategy so you can give it to the integrator or whoever you partner with later and say this is what I want to do and it's your job to stay in the driver's seat of strategy.

Dude, this is phenomenal. I'm googling the honest company right now. That's why it took me a minute to say something. Thanks for coming on man. This is phenomenal as always. You just deliver so much value in a short period of time. This is such good content.

Three days.

Totally. Guys, for those of you listening, come to Austin. If you're going to come shoot me an email andyfoundation.com and let me know and we'll try and carve out some time to hang out. Ryan, thank you so much man.

Thanks for having me dude. It's always good to chat with you.

Always a pleasure.

The older I get, the more I realize that Tim Ferriss was right when he said that there is less competition at the top. So you might as well set really ambitious, tall ordered goals. And I realized that most people aren't willing to play at a high level.

So if you are, you actually have.

An easier time than trying to compete with all the people who are trying to do exactly the same thing. And that's why I'm willing to punt years of my life to get good enough to compete with the best in the world because there's fewer of them as long as I'm willing to put in the work. I've also learned that some strategies are better than others. I believe that there is a formula for success and it looks like this. It's beliefs times strategy and execution times time equals your results. If you stay at something for long enough, you usually get success.

If you have a really good strategy.

You tend to get great success. If you just have beliefs that drive you bigger than most people, all of those things multiplied against one another end up being your success formula. And I just choose to believe certain things that drive me. I strive to have an interest in what strategy is going to get me there and I'm willing to put in as much time as necessary in order.

To reach that result.

So if you are like me and you have a moonshot goal, even if that moonshot goal is a hundred million dollar business or a million dollar business, or just to live a life that your parents thought was impossible, I think.

The fastest way to hack that is.

To look at other people's strategies and surround yourself in an environment that normalizes that success. As always, I appreciate what you're doing in the world. I think it's entrepreneurs and people who have a growth, abundance mindset that end up changing this world.

And that's you. I just want to honor that and.

I consider it a privilege that you listen to me rant in front of my microphone and that you find value in it enough to subscribe and to continue to listen and to talk about it.

So thanks.

Thanks for hanging out with me.

We'll see you guys on the next episode.

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