The Top 1 Percent of Entrepreneurs : What I've Learned From The Best

Hey, everybody. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran, and in this video, I want to share with you what I have learned from the entrepreneurs that I've had the privilege to interview over my six or seven years as an interviewer, a podcast host, and the host of the Capitalism Conference, which is an event that we do every year@harrocapitalism.com I've had the privilege of sitting on stage with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. And today I'm going to share with you some lessons that I've learned from. From who I think are some of the most interesting entrepreneurs that I've had the privilege of connecting with. I'm gonna start with the obvious one here on the board. I wonder who this is. Gary Voom. V. Something. V. Something. Yeah. So, Gary. We're just going. Gary V.

So I met Gary at the Capitalism conference back in 2015, and one of the reason why I invited him to come on the stage was because he has a goal of buy the New York jets. And I had never heard him talk about how he planned to make the $6 billion that it's going to take to buy an NFL franchise. My goal, ever since I was a kid was to buy the Cleveland Indians, or at least buy a Major League baseball team. So I wanted to hear from Gary what his method was, and it was the first time I ever heard him actually explain the strategy. If you want to hear the whole episode, by the way of any of these, we post some of the recordings from our live events over on a podcast called the capitalism.com podcast. So just search on Spotify or on itunes for capitalism.com podcast and they'll come up, and there are going to be interviews from some of the most successful entrepreneurs that we've had the privilege of connecting with. What Gary said to me was that his entire thesis was building a machine that he could use as a proxy. And for him, that was VaynerMedia. It's building the media presence for him to be able to go out and acquire another business, put it through his machine, and flip a business for $6 billion. So he's gonna buy a dove. You know, the soap line dove. He's gonna put it through his marketing machine, and he's gonna flip a business, and that's how he's gonna get the New York Jets. And for the first time, I ever was like, oh, my goodness. Been thinking about money, not about the machine. How would I think differently? How would I operate my business differently if I thought about the machine that I was building? Not the money that I was making, because ultimately that's what we're doing, right? You either have a machine to build your life, you have a machine to give you a result. But we often chase the dollars instead of build the machine that spits out the dollars. How guilty are we of that? So for Gary, it was, he's going to build the machine that allows him to build companies. And that's when I switched over to thinking more about, all right, how do I build more of an incubator type of approach in my business to where when I share stuff freely on the Internet, like I'm doing right now, it is a machine for me to have more influence. It's a machine for me to be able to be investing in more companies, to be incubating more entrepreneurs. And that's the thing that's going to give me the Cleveland Indians. So that was my biggest takeaway from Gary Vee. I had the privilege of having dinner with him a few months ago. It was the first time I had seen him in person since I had talked with him on stage. And his second piece of advice was, don't be in such a rush. It'll happen. Keep building the machine and it'll happen. All right, I'm gonna skip up to the top here. Cause the next person that I really learned a lot from was Brian Lee. Brian Lee is the founder of the Honest Company. And Brian had a really interesting approach to building businesses. He built the Honest company, he built LegalZoom, he built Art of Sport, all really, really successful multi, multi million dollar businesses. And the thing I learned from him was that he operates like a producer. He does not go out and invent the products. He doesn't operate the businesses. He hires the CEO, he brings in the audience and the influencers, he raises the money, he goes and brings the product ideas and he lets good people do their thing. And that's how he has built multiple hundred million dollar companies. That's absurd. And he's young too. He's like, I don't know, 40 something. I don't know. And he's got multiple hundred million dollar companies because he acts like a producer. Humble guy. Dude, out of everyone I've ever interviewed at the Capitalism conference, this person changed my brain the most. Sitting down and me hearing through, how do you build $100 million companies? And just like that was a, it's a master class. Like, it's what you would pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn is to sit there and watch somebody talk about how he operates in the producer's chair. How many of us entrepreneurs just beat ourselves to death with work? And he is a busy guy, but he just allocates the pieces. He plays chess rather than checkers. And that's what I learned from Brian Lee. Alright, let's skip over.

Let's go over here to Moise Ali. Moises Ali spoke at our event this past year and and Moyes had a fascinating story because he went from zero to selling a company for $100 million in Dos Anos two years. That's absurd. That doesn't happen. So how did moyes get to $100 million in two years? He did it through having a different kind of a product. It was a product that was sort of new to the marketplace. It was a new type of deodorant and, and he did it with an audience and he did it with a team of like a few people and the result said they would $100 million. He was just different enough in the marketplace. He had just enough of an audience. The product was good and it got the attention of the right buyer. And what I learned from this was seeing how fast things can grow when you have the right pieces lined up of what magic can happen when you just put yourself in the right place at the right time, surround yourself with the right people, bring a product to the market that people really like and you operate efficiently and do it smart. And you get $100 million. Well, he got $100 million. Alright, let's skip over to. Actually I'm gonna skip down to. One of the ways that this happened was using the methods of Russell Brunson. Russell Brunson talked about building funnels, funnels for physical product brands. Physical or building funnels for digital products, products for personal brands. And what he walked through was what you have to have lined up in order for something to catch fire like.

A hundred million dollar company. He talked about how to basically run the numbers that so you have the machine that gets you a big company that you produce. So he walked us through the process of what needs to be in place in order to be able to scale one of those companies really quickly. He runs $100 million software company and he's advised countless seven and eight figure businesses that are physical product companies or digital product companies. So he talked about the actual mechanism to building the machine that we talked about. He actually talked about what needs to be in place for you to run that. And Moyes, I know, used some of those processes, used some of those methodologies and strategies to be able to scale to the level that he did. So if you listen to that talk, which we published on the podcast, just search for the capitalism.com podcast. If you listen to that, you'll actually hear the mechanism, the strategy behind building the machine. And then the last person that really impressed everyone in the audience was a man by the name of George Bryant. And George talked about using social media to be able to, what he calls ethically scale. And what he meant by that was, how do you craft a message to be in front of your ideal market so that you're getting your best buyers that you can advertise to, that builds the machine that gives you the end result that you want? And so all of this kind of flowed together when we put George's talk in context, which was, how do you craft a message that connects with somebody and do it in a way that compels them to buy, makes them want to choose you, rather than you trying to force something down their throat? We, as entrepreneurs, think about the money so much that sometimes we do it in a way that takes away from the customer experience rather than builds it. George talked about flipping that on its head, doing it in a way that deposited trust into your relationship bank account.

With your customers that allows you to scale a lot faster. And so when you tie all of this together, you have a message that resonates. You have a mechanism for building the machine that gives you the big company and the profits that I know that you want if you're building a business. So we took all of these talks, they're my favorite ones, and we just published them onto a new podcast called the capitalism.com podcast. And we're gonna be taking some of our favorite talks and putting them there on the podcast. And we're doing that because I know that when you hear the strategies and the mechanisms, you're gonna want to come to our next event. We do a yearly event called the Capitalism Conference, where we invite the most interesting entrepreneurs of the year, and we give them a platform, and we invite some people from our audience, and we basically give the best insights that we've developed over the last year so that we can grow really impactful, meaningful, fun, profitable companies and do it in a way that adds value to the world. So you can find the podcast over on itunes or on Spotify. It's called the capitalism.com podcast. And I'd also invite you to go to thecapitalismconference.com and get on the notification list for our next event. Hope you enjoyed this video and that these insights will be beneficial for you and your business. Full talks on the capitalism.com podcast. Enjoy.