From $700 to 7-Figures: How Ethan King Built Multiple Brands from His Basement

If your circle is not also trying to empower you to get to the next level, then it's not a circle, it's a cage.

Hello, I'm Larry Wydell. This is the Big Hitter podcast and we're talking to Ethan King. Hello, Ethan.

Hey, Larry. How are you? Great to have. Great to be here today.

Yeah. You know, Ethan, looking at your bio, it's just amazing. Amazingly impressed because you built a couple of brands from scratch, Seven and eight figure brands. And you started in your basement with a hundred dollars. I can't say that I did that, but I did start on food stamps and unemployment. After I got laid off for my big construction job and had to, at some point, I moved up a pioneer organization, opened an organization up in North Carolina, moving from Atlanta, and out of my basement, we had to find something to pay for the rental truck. So we went down our basement, we had two weekend yard sales and I made $750, which was such a success, I thought about forgetting the business and going into the yard sale business. But anyway, we both kind of came out of the basement with a few hundred dollars. And so, man, I'm proud of you. That's fantastic. And you went on to that, to where, you know, driving multiple businesses, but even working with major brands like Marvel Studios, Coca Cola, Target, Starbucks, Tyler Perry, you know, you know, it's just what a success story you've had. And you're a young guy. I'm older than I look.

It's been a journey of about 25 years. My entrepreneurial journey.

Oh, good Lord.

It started as a college school project. My first company started Stuff for Greeks. And I was, it was, I was an art major in college, of all things. And my parents said, you know, artists don't make any money until after they're dead. Right, Ethan? So I, I set out to prove them wrong. That was, that was my, my initial motivation. But I, I started this project. We had a branding class where we had to create a fictitious company and then design the website, the logo, the business cards, all the marketing collateral around this company. So at the time, I had just recently crossed into my fraternity, so I decided to call it Stuff for Greeks because I was already designing all the stuff for my fraternity and some of the other Greeks on campus. So I figured, why not? And I bought the domain Stuff for Greeks. And here, still to this day, 25 years later, it is still one of the top players in the E Commerce space. And we've been very fortunate to, to be a first mover in that E Commerce brand. And yeah, I started it with my girlfriend at the time. We scraped together $700 and now she's my wife of 22 years and we have two amazing kids.

Congratulations. Unbelievable. And so I guess the idea of starting the project was to give you an excuse to do your art. You know, you'd have to come up with art, you know, like basically kind of like a theme for if you were having a show in a gallery or whatever, you'd have a theme. And so this is a, an excuse to challenge you to come up with all kind of different artwork and everything. How long were you, how long was art a big part of your life?

From the earliest I can remember taking it seriously and wanting it to be. My career was around eighth grade, that's when. And I wanted to be a traditional artist like drawing and painting. And I actually had my art when I got to high school. I was taking college level art classes and actually had pieces and exhibits and I was selling art and I got perfect 5, 5 out of 5 on both AP art classes. So I was very, very serious about becoming a fine artist like drawing and painting. But I quickly learned that my parents were right. Artists really don't make a lot of money. And I was, I was this real textbook starving artists for a good part of my youth. But what I did was with that school project, I converted my desire to be an artist from the traditional fine art in drawing and painting to graphic art and marketing in digital multimedia. So it's just a different canvas, a digital canvas.

I kind of started out in art the same way around 12, 13 years old. But what I found was once I got into business and I switched in college too, from architecture over to building construction. But I never knew until years later how being involved in the arts in terms of observational skills, organizing compositions on canvas, the problem solving you have to do art. It's a lot of problem solving. You know, you got to figure out how, how you're going to get that image down there, how you're going to make it interesting. And so many variables too. Light and dark, color combination, hue. And so the thing. And you're thinking about the margins and you're thinking about how people are going to look at it for the. And where, where's the eye going to go to right from the beginning? All of these really relate to business. You know, what's your folk, you know, Cause you get into business and they're good. You know, they say, you know, well, what is it that you're. What problem are you solving? For people, you know, that's the same thing. Like, where's the focus on your. Where do you want the eye to go on that canvas? And then you can't let stop with that. You know, you want the eye to not stop on a canvas. You want it to move around the canvas and, you know, give them someplace to go and give them something to come back to and keep them intrigued. It's funny, Even in the MoMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, they say you take the Rembrandt Rembrandts, the Monets, Van Goghs, the average amount of time, even the Louvre in Paris, the average length of time people look at those masterpieces is like three seconds, then go, yeah, I saw that. That's great. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I'm glad that you really brought up the synchronicities between, like, art and business, because what it really is about is the user experience. We're visual creatures as humans. So it's about how do you guide the user to do what you want them to do? That in a way that benefits not just you, the company, but it has to benefit the user. Like, otherwise people aren't going to do business with you. So I had. I had done something right. Now, I'll confess it was a little bit accidental. I was doing it for fun. I was passionate about it. But I designed this website in a way that spoke to my target audience, my target customer who were members of fraternity and fraternities and sororities who wanted to stand out and at the time. And also timing is another thing. I think that any successful business owner isn't being 100% honest if they don't admit that there's a little bit of luck, especially when it comes to things like timing. And we happened to launch this website at a time when this brand new search engine was just hitting the market called google.com. and I don't know if you remember when Google first came out, but there was nothing on the screen, just a search bar. There were no ads or anything else. So I think this was in like the year 2000, 2001. And because our website was positioned the way it was, we hit the number one spot organically. We were at the top of page one for every keyword that our target audience was looking for. So that gave us a huge head start in the marketplace. And before we ever spent a dollar on advertising, it was a good three years that we had grown the company. And I knew that we were onto something the moment we got a sale from a complete stranger in A state across the country, Someone that we didn't know that wasn't a friend of ours.

Yeah, you know, that was by design that they had that clean page. That was a big thing. And they had Marissa Mayer, I think, who went on to run Yahoo. But she was the goddess of that page. She was the doorkeeper. Anybody wanted to get on that first page with Google had to go through her and, and she didn't let many people through. You know, they started with the little things at the top. They had more and more of those little. Yeah, but the page stayed white by design. And it's interesting how these things started, how they play out. You know, good ideas play out over time. And I think a lot of those design things, you know, they still have in place. It worked. And so similar thing happened with you with stuff for Greeks. You know, you came up with a good concept and here, 25 years later is still going strong. How did you get that? So timing's great, but you gotta take, you gotta capitalize on it. And that's one thing that, you know, everybody has good fortune. You know, we have bad. You're gonna have bad luck, you're gonna have good luck. I heard Bill O'Reilly talking, you know, he used to be the number one guy on Fox News and a lot of shows before the entertainment shows, and he's a big guy and they had a blow up and it's like he, it was like Tucker Carlson, he just got fired. You know, he's the number one guy. He just got fired. And so they had him. He was on a show recently and he said, oh, he said, he's, you know, they were asking about it, he's still bitter. He said, oh, he said, everybody gets fired. You know, it doesn't matter where you are in the world. Everybody has, whether it was right or wrong, it happens. Don't worry about it. Everybody has car wrecks, everybody has disasters happen. Everybody has things in life, you know. You know, sooner or later, you know, you're going to have a hail storm and it's going to dent your car. You know what I'm saying? What are you going to do about that? And so the deal is you got to get on with your life. But when you have good fortune, you know, every time you have bad fortune, you got for sanity, you gotta say, okay, I'm gonna have some good fortune to balance this out. I'll live through this, but I'm gonna have some good fortune coming. You gotta be ready for it. You gotta capitalize on it. Because good fortune Is kind of like a wave you're out surfing. That wave is only gonna take you so far. You gotta paddle, you know, you gotta jump on. You gotta harness that thing and ride it, you know? So how did you ride that wave of momentum and good fortune?

The wave is a perfect metaphor. Perfect analogy. I've. I've taken surfing lessons. I'm not the world's greatest surfer, but, yeah, you gotta catch that wave, and your timing has to be right, your balance has to be right to ride that wave. So I've done this several times in my life at the time. With. That. You're asking about with stuff for Greeks. When we originally launched, the company we were all about just, we'll design things for you. I was. I was a graphic designer, so I would do a design for you of your jackets, your T shirts, your flyers. You know, you go get them made somewhere else. And then we. So. But we listened to our customers, because our customers started asking, well, no, I want you to make the jacket for me. I don't want to have to go get it made somewhere else. Well, at the time, we didn't know how to. I didn't know how to make a jacket. I'm like, what do I need a sewing machine? What. I didn't even know what it was called, but enough people started asking for it. And then what I did was I put up a sale page on the website to buy the jacket from us. And then when someone bought, then I figured out how to do it. So I always test the marketplace first and make sure someone is actually willing to spend the money. Not. Not just say that they. They will spend the money, but actually spend their money. And that's how I know that there's a market for this after a few people do that. And then I will go learn how to do it, because I believe that you can learn how to do anything. If someone else has done it on this earth, you can learn how to do it too.

Yeah. And you actually stumbled across one of the main techniques businesses at all levels are talking about when you go into expansion. You know, the big thing in marketing right now is build a wait list, create a demand. You know, you go out there and before you launch a product, make sure there's a demand for it. And so you. Your instincts were. Your instincts are pretty good, Ethan, Right from the beginning. And so how did that. How rapidly did that unfold? You know, because it had to be. You started winning. You know, you had a project and you started winning bigger in this thing. And it's Kind of like once things start going, it's like, let's let it roll. Let's let it roll and see where it'll go. So how did you. How did that continue to expand? How fast did it get big?

So initially, after we took that first jacket order, we went out and found a company, and I discovered that it was called Embroidery the process. And we found an. Found an embroidery company. We showed them an example. We said, hey, can you make this? And they said, yeah. And we said, okay, can you give us a deal? And like, you just charge us like a discount rate. We'll mark it up and sell it to our customers? They said, yes. In the first year, we did over 100 jackets, and that company actually fired us. So you're right, you do get fired. So this company, their specialty, and it was a mom and pop shop, super nice people, but their specialty was like little league teams, baseball uniforms, football uniforms. And we were bringing them so much business with these complex jackets that we. Orders that we were taking custom designs.

And stuff like that.

Custom designs that they were like, hey, you're, You're. Your orders are taking up too much time. We aren't able to service our core customer, so we're going to have to let you go, Ethan. And I was like, no, you guys do great work. Please, please don't fire us. We. We don't know where to. How to do this. And the guy, his name is Virgil, he was so nice. He actually let me come back in, in his shop and watch over his shoulder for one evening. And I just soaked up everything. I took notes on which machines to get, how he did everything. He's like, I'm going to show you this one time. And he showed me the whole process from start to finish. So that he fired us with grace. And then we went to a trade show, bought our own machinery, hired our own staff, and then continued to scale up from that point forward.

It didn't dawn on you to go and find another manufacturer on that? What caused you to say, we're going to do this ourselves?

Well, because he was nice enough to show me how to do it. Because if he wasn't nice enough to show me how to do it, then I would have had to find someone else. And I kind of had an inkling, like, I knew how to do about half of the job, but it was that other half of actually, because half of it was just. It was graphic design. The other half was, how do you actually get the stuff onto the jackets? Because I don't know anything about Sewing, I've never, never sewed anything in my life with. So he showed me how to do that part and I'm thankful to him because if he didn't, we would have to just keep going to other, other manufacturers on our behalf.

And so how long did it take you get up and running with and you had the money to get the machines and all of that stuff and the place to put them and all of that.

We went out and got a SBA loan for our first two machines and we put, we had saved up a little bit of money to put our deposit down on the bank loan. And my wife and I were both, at first we had part time jobs. This was just a side hustle. So we had the income coming from our steady paychecks so we were comfortable at that point. We were just kind of halfway entrepreneurs at that point. But then I ended up going in full time. In fact, I remember the date, I call it my Freedom Day. April 10, 2004 is when I turned in my letter of resignation at the company where I was working full time. I was applying, working at a newspaper as a graphic designer. And I remember I got into an, my boss and I got into a disagreement and she blamed me for a mistake that really a salesperson else had made, a salesperson had made and she didn't want to hear my side of it. And I said, you know what if I took this 8 to 10 hours a day that I'm devoting to this company and apply it to the momentum that I have going in this business, I can really take this thing far. I knew that I could. So I turned in my letter, letter of resignation and it was a great small company and they said they were worried that I was going to a competitor. And I remember my manager said to me, well, what are you going to do after this? And something came over me and this will sound, it sounded really arrogant, I'm sure, but I didn't mean it this way. But something came over me and I said I'm never going to work for anyone else again and I haven't worked for anyone else. And that was 20, it was 2004, so that was 21 years ago. And it was just a knowing that came over me and I've been my own boss ever since. And I've been blessed to employ dozens of others along the way.

Such an important thing for new people or people who are thinking about making the jump is to have, think about having a steady income as you launch your business and try and think of it as Two full time. You know, this is the way I've always described it. You want to, you wanna go through a stage where you got two full time jobs because when you really launch your own business, you're probably gonna be working double time anyway. And so you might as well learn how to work like that before you go. What you think is full time is gonna turn into probably six for a while anyway. Sixteen hour days. You might as well learn how to double time. And that way plus it takes some of the stress off. You got your groceries, you got your basics covered and you can throw all, you get rid of stress. I mean stress is such a killer and financial pressure will break iron. I don't care. There is not a person strong enough to withstand the pressure of finances. When you've got family and obligations like that looking at you and you got to buy groceries and it never goes away. And so having that off your mind where you can't take that negative energy and put it into the positive thing, don't minimize that folks. And don't jump too soon. But there will be a moment to where you say, I can jump now because your inside will tell you. And the fact that it was a good timing was the right time for you was because your subconscious said, okay, you're never going to work for anybody else the rest of your life. You were ready to do that. Maybe a year, you know, a few months earlier that would have been a scary thing for you. But it was at that moment. It wasn't scary, was it?

Right, exactly.

You haven't success you're compounding. When did it get scary?

Man? It got. There have been several points where it got really scary. I'll tell you one was when. So we were working out of our basement after that. And then we outgrew our basement. So at the time we had about eight people coming to our house, eight employees coming to our house. UPS truck was coming by every day. We were, we were breaking all the rules of the HOA and man, we felt really bad, but we did not know where we wanted to go from that point. Do we want to lease an office or you know, what do we want to do? And at the time, I was, one of my clients at the time was Tyler Perry. And this was when Tyler, before he became the Tyler Perry that we know now, he was kind of just starting out, getting into the movie scene. He, he had his, he was doing plays first. Then he opened up a little studio. And so I was watching his growth unfold. And Tyler's mentor is oprah Oprah Winfrey. So one thing that he learned from her that he taught me, was own it, own it, own it, own it. And those words just resonated with me. And we were looking at leasing office space. I said, no, you know what? We're going to buy something. And we didn't have a ton of money at the time, but we went out and we found an abandoned office building on the west side of Atlanta that had been sitting there empty for three years. So we got a great deal on it. We got another SBA loan on the building, and we funded the construction. We literally cut and paste. We couldn't afford to architect, so we literally cut and paste the architectural drawing together, and we were able to get into that building. And now that building is worth millions because they built the Belt line through it, and the west side of Atlanta has flourished. So it's been a great investment, but it's because I followed that knowledge. So always have a great mentor is what I tell people. And listen, listen and pay attention, because a lot of times you can achieve more than you realize. We didn't think at the time would be we'd be able to afford an office building, but we pulled it off. And that's still where our headquarters is today. That was very scary.

So your headquarters is still there. That's amazing. Well, the thing is that when you have the opportunity to be around people like an Oprah Tyler Perry on the way up, you pick. You know, they say greatness is caught and not taught. You know, fundamentals. You know, the way it goes is fundamentals are taught, but greatness is caught. And it's come. It comes by observing how other people and yourself use the fundamentals. It's like, because when you're. The fundamentals are taught to you. If I say grow or die or things like that, it's like learning gravity. Okay, gravity, you know, but, you know, the impact of that over time dawns on you in different situations and everything. And so when you have the chance to be around someone who is on the way up or, you know, like Tyler Perry or Oprah, who's already up there, just being around there somehow, you know, it's like throwing a rock into a lake, the ripples that go out. Even if you only get the ripple of their influence, it can make a big difference because it's coming from a valid source. You see what I'm saying? And that information came from a valid source. And have you stayed. You've stayed in touch with Tyler Perry over the years?

You know, he's gotten huge. And I haven't. I've lost touch with him directly, but he still knows who I am. And I've done some work with his team, but, you know, I've seen him. Him evolve to the place where his assistants have assistants, have assistants, have assistants.

That's how you get big. You free yourself up to do the things that only you can do. But that evolution is good for you, too. Even just observing that is a pattern. Seeing those patterns, whether you realize it or not, it's like, okay, all right, as I get bigger assistance, who have assistance, who have assistance, but the progression, because if you are doing something great, you're going to progress, you're going to outgrow it, and you're going to need to get more people involved because you run out of your 24 hours in the day. And so where did you. What was another scary thing that you got up to that was kind of shook you a little bit?

I'll tell you another one. So one day, Larry, I was sitting in my office in that same headquarters. My office was upstairs, and we keep the doors open, and this guy comes storming up the stairs and into my office. And it was very strange because it was a hot summer day in Atlanta, and it gets really hot and humid here. But this guy had on a trench coat, and he came barging into my office and reaches in his coat, pulls out a thick envelope, slams it on my desk, and he says, you've been served. And I was slapped with. Yeah, we were slapped with a lawsuit. Out of nowhere, this company that we had been doing business with for several years, they found a loophole in a contract and decided to come after us. And it was totally frivolous lawsuit, but our backs were against the wall, and we had to fight this thing. And as anyone who's been through this knows, no one wins in a lawsuit except the lawyers. The lawyers get paid, right? So we had to scrape up money. It cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. If I look at the. The lost revenue and the time distractions, we. We probably lost over $2 million in opportunity cost to fight this legal battle. We had people who. Who quit. We couldn't afford to. To rehire them for those positions, and we had to let go of some people. So it was a very, very dark time in our business. And in fact, we, you know, the first lawyer we had just encouraged that maybe we should consider filing bankruptcy. And it was very, very scary. Yeah. So we had a choice. I was like, okay, I'm either going to fight this thing or, and keep this business alive or give up, file bankruptcy and lose everything we worked hard for. But I decided to fight. And in order to fight, I knew that I had to keep the marketing going, but I had to figure out how to keep the marketing going without putting people because people cost money. So I didn't have money. So that's when I learned marketing automation. And this was like, this was like around 20 in the early 2010s, like between 2011, 2014 and now. Keep in mind, I'm not a techie guy by nature. You know, I was an art major like I told you. But I went and learned marketing automation and that's when we first started doing like our email marketing campaigns and automating those. Then we learned how to automate our social media and we just went. We adopted this automation first mindset and adopted it throughout of our company. Now we came out of that ordeal a few years later and by then we had doubled our revenue with half the staff that we had going into the situation.

Really what advice would you say? Because that's something people don't think, none of us think about where we're going to go into business. That, you know, there are people out there just waiting to sue you. But when you start a business, you don't think about, you know, it's an evil, wicked world in some ways. And as you go out there and you get big, you're going to attract the. And be successful. You're going to attract the attention of the evil spirits that are looking for the next target. But in our wildest dreams, we don't think that's going to happen, do we?

Yeah, we don't. We don't. And it's. There were so many emotions around it. I was scared, I was embarrassed, I was angry. Oh my goodness. I mean, it's just. But you're right. And I mean I talked to. The good thing is I had other business owners, part of communities I'm in where I was able to talk to my peers and they were just like, oh, this is your first lawsuit.

They thought it was humorous probably.

Yeah, like, oh, you got pinched. Okay, well here's what you need to do. Here's what I did get the big letterhead, you know. Yeah. So. But the first time it's scary, but. But that's how you build character. That's how you build these different muscles that you need to grow bigger and to be a big hitter. And then I'll continue to encounter levels like that in my life.

Unfortunately, they never Run out. There's always another big one. But what your reflex that you developed there was, how can I use this to my advantage? And how can we get through with it? Rather than woe is me. I'm overwhelmed. And that's why even on the way up, folks, you gotta become a problem solver right from the beginning. Because if you can't solve the little problems of how to get started and get people's attention and learn the little things, you gotta learn, like with the sewing machines and you know, the embroidery, even the word embroidery, you know what I'm saying? Learning the language. If you can't do that, you're probably not equipped to be an entrepreneur or be a leader or anything like that. Cause you gotta, you're gonna have to bounce. You're gonna have to have a big bounce back factor and a big resiliency thing. And more than anything else, that is a difference maker. And you getting big because you allows you to maintain your momentum. You can take a hit, minimize it, and then get back on track. Like you said with the marketing, we're not gonna give up our marketing. I'm not. You know, they might take my money, but they're not gonna take my marketing and my reputation and the momentum that I've got. I'm going to do everything I can to keep that going forward. May have to lose some employees, may have to do some adjustments here, but I'm going to keep the main thing that we've worked so hard. Because when you say I don't want to bankrupt means everything goes to a stop. And what you decided was, I'm going to keep it going. Now when you say keep the business going, that's marketing, you know, that's products going out the door, new clients coming in, all of those, you know, servicing existing client. That's your business and that's what you don't want to let get interrupted. And so how long did that, that take you right there?

The lawsuit is. It was, it was only about 8 months from start to finish before the lawsuit got settled. But that felt like a long eight months. And the thing about it, Larry, is that the ripple effects, the ramifications, ramifications of that afterward we dealt with for years because we sn. We stacked on debt that we didn't have. I mean, I remember we got this, what do they call those loans, these loans that they give businesses now where you can pay back daily and the interest is ridiculous. That was all we had to turn to at the time. So we were just getting buried and buried in debt, in interest. So it took us a good three years to recover from that financial. But fortunately I had. I learned a lot about automation and we had this. We put things in place and that's how we were able to continue growing and get out of that debt hole and above. Above where we were by not having to throw human resources at everything that we were doing.

Well, it's another reason. If you can have this in your mind, folks, build up your cash reserves, have some buffer, because you're going to have bumps, you're going to have surprises, and if they're not negative, then when opportunities come along, you're able to jump on those things where otherwise, if you didn't have those reserves in place, you'd have to let them pass. It's important to be building reserves right from the beginning. It's just like savings. If you're an employee and you're young and starting out, always have a buffer, always have a cushion. Put that aside. You're gonna need it. You know, you're gonna need it as an individual or as a business person. So how did you ramp that thing up and move into your Zeus closet phase? Did you sell the business? Did you exit it or are you still running it?

No, we're still running it. I have a great team. My wife is primarily focused on that. Running that business with a small team we have there, and it's doing great. So we pivoted from just with stuff for Greeks. We were only doing the fraternity and sorority stuff. With Zeus's closet and the retail store, we got on bigger clients. That's how we got into the movie studios. Custom wardrobe departments, school uniforms, things like that. The entertainment industry. What happened, Larry, is that we make these elaborate jackets that really stand out. And that's what we were doing. The fraternities and sororities. Well, people in the entertainment industry really like that too. The rappers and things like that. Yeah. So we've actually had jackets worn on the Grammy stage by the original. The founders of hip hop music, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5. So that was, that was a huge honor. So we've had, you know, Rick Ross, like a lot of people in the entertainment industry come to us for these jackets that are one of a kind, stand out and they have the budget to afford them. So it's been, it's been very fun expanding into that market and creating a brand name for Zeus's closet. But along the way, since we've had these great automations and systems and processes and a great team in place, I've Started teaching other entrepreneurs how to implement AI and automation in their businesses so that they can scale. Because right now a lot of businesses are struggling here in 2025. We are in some, probably some pretty tumultuous economic times for most business owners that I talk to.

So your brand was elevated. Another good timing thing is the explosion of all of those movie studios in Atlanta. The music business, I mean, not the music, but I mean the movie business in Atlanta. It's amazing how many monster studios there are all over that town. Now did you get in there through a referral basis or how do you get into the big studios like that? Yeah, friend to friend to friend.

Yeah, a little bit of referral. But also I'm glad you brought up the timing thing again because here's something that we implemented in our business that wasn't very common and honestly it still isn't common today. Maybe 10 years ago or so, eight years ago, we had a backlog of work. So if you came to us and said, hey, I need this thing embroidered and I need it today or I need it tomorrow, we would turn people away because we had a two week backlog of work already in the queue. Well, one day I went on vacation with my family. We, we're big roller coaster, amusement park aficionados. My kids love that. And you know, when I, when I was young, we couldn't afford to like skip the line. We would be in a line for three hours. Well now I'll pay in a heartbeat. I'll pay these fast pass genies, anything to get ahead in the line so I don't waste my time. And it just hit me. We could do the same thing in our business. What if we just offer like a skip the line fee, A rush fee for you to get in front of the pack. And what if we just offer people more instead of telling them no? Well, yeah, you can get, you can do same day, it's going to cost three times more. So we tried it. Everything's just an experiment. Well, people actually paid us three times more to get their stuff faster. So we ended up, we implemented this graded scale of rush, same day, rush, next day rush, three business days. So you could choose how fast you want to get your items. Just like if you ship something with FedEx, you know, overnight, it's going to cost way more than ground costs. Right. So that really helped us stand out. And it one, it added to our profit margin line because that was almost pure profit just to move someone up, up in, in the order of things. But two, it also Positioned us for the movie studios because they always need stuff today. Yeah, they're always running behind, hey, we need these uniforms. We're shooting right now. How fast can you do them? And they don't really, they have the budget for it. They don't really care about the price. So we were already positioned and the timing was right because it was in conjunction with the movie boom in Atlanta in Georgia because of the tax abatement. So it was another thing where opportunity, you know, luck is like, you got to know the opportunity's there, but you got to know how to seize the opportunity. So all of those things were in place.

And the thing there is, folks, think about how you can get into some higher ticket clients, like movie studios rather than somebody at a fraternity want to buy a jacket, you know, and they, they, they're still in college, but they still want the fancy jacket. So it's a little harder sell, a little hard to tack on those margins. But when you get in with the studios, and who knows, they might order 20 of them or something like that, you know, and when you, you hear how much money's in those, you know, you need to be listening. And when you listen to CBS fired Colbert. Colbert, you know, they're stopping him next year, the Stephen Colbert show. And all the numbers start to come out. It's a $200 million a year thing. They're losing, you know, 40 million a year. And they figured out if that was the case, the average staffer is getting paid $500,000 a year out there, which is somehow these numbers have got to be raw. But you can see when you get into the big corporations, a lot of money floats around and everything. It's like, how can I get some of that on me? You know? And you might think about what your market is. And there's a lot of big, big budgets out there. And so depending on what your business is, you might think about how you can posture yourself to be able to get into some of that that reaches your own profile. And then now you have gone on, you said, I want to dig into that. You know, you become a bestselling author, you've become a keynote speaker, a TEDx presenter, a guy making jackets in Atlanta. And so how does this, you know, what's going to happen to you, where you're going to go back? And you just say, okay, I'm going to restart my art career. Because that's what I did because I started at 12, 13 years old. Photography and abstract art. I did it all through high school. But reality set in in college, and I went into architecture and then building construction because I didn't want to have to wait till 35 to start making money in architecture. That's a terrible profession in terms of how long you got. You might as well go ahead and be a doctor for how long it takes you to make significant income. But I said, okay, I'll go build. How? Halfway through the architecture, I said, how can I get out of Georgia Tech? I went to Georgia Tech. I lived in Atlanta. I lived in Buckhead 13 years. Yeah. So we've traveled the same path there. But, you know, the thing is now, you know, in later years in life, you know, I've been able to get. I've always done it and. But now I'm doing it more professionally. Art and photography. But you have the resources and the time and the contacts, and so I bet you're going to get back into art down the road then, you know.

Maybe I will one day. And another thing that also helps is now you also have the business experience behind it because it's also art and you have a little bit of a name for yourself. You know, I was inspired by former president George W. Bush. You know, he's an artist, right?

He's a portrait artist.

Yeah, yeah, he's. And he's really good.

Yeah.

And, you know, he's got.

He's gotten good. But I tell one reason he got good. He did a lot of it, and he had instruction, where not a lot of people will get the instruction, but he did a lot of it. He's had instruction, and he knew all these people. And he said, you know, I know him personally, you know, why don't I paint them? You know, and so. Interesting.

Yeah. But it also makes it easier to sell art, too. Once you have a name.

Once you have a name. And so anyway, how did this. Where did you get the idea, I'm gonna write a book, I'm gonna become a speaker? How did you get your name out there to where you're doing? You know, you're basically becoming a brand.

Yeah, Well, I have to give credit. It started out in the peer group I was telling you about. EO Entrepreneurs Organization, which is. EO is kind of like ypo, where you have these forums and chapters and it's a global network. But I. I leaned on that, and that's how I got a lot of the business knowledge that I have. But I also started speaking and took on leadership roles and board roles within the organization. Well, that put me on stages in front of other members in front of other chapters, and people started to say, hey, you're really good at this, Ethan. And people would come up to me months later after they heard me give a talk, and they say, I remember the points you made from this talk back in August. This, this, and this. And I. You know, at first, I'm like. I was kind of dismissive. I was like, oh, no. I was shy. I felt like I was fumbling my words. But then I started to realize again, listening to people, listening to my target, to my customer, and maybe giving it a try, putting it out there. But then it's also making an impact, a positive impact in people's lives. And that was really the missing part. I mean, it's great. Don't get me wrong. It's great to make an awesome jacket for someone and to see their reaction and to see them wearing it somewhere and enjoying it, but to make an impact in the way someone thinks and the actions that they take. To me, the joy that that brings me is more massive than anything else. And I just. I kind of got addicted to that. And I had these speeches. I was speaking for a good five years before I published my first book, wealth beyond Money. And then after that, I already had the audience from that. And then I did the TED talk, and then I published my second book, ChatGPT to double your business in 90 days, last year.

Well, the thing is that these groups are a secret weapon that a lot of entrepreneurs coming into the, you know, this world don't know about. But it's like, who can you learn from? And so I create. I came across this Gina Bianchini of Mighty Networks, and she explained to me last November about communities, which is another formalization of things like the entrepreneur, network and organization. And so many of these around the country that are kind of like below the surface to people, unless you're in there, it's like, wow, how is this going on? There's all kinds of great lessons that come up. It's like, how long has this been going on? I didn't know about it. There's so many whirls out there of people doing things together with similar interests that. And then when you combine that with the fact that there's more learning happens on a gradual basis. In fact, they say even in Harvard, huge study. Four times more learning and personal change happens from your learning things from your peer group than listen to a guru on stage. You know, and you go to a Pay, you know, $10,000 to go through a weekend training, you get a baptism by fire. Fire Hose of ideas. But that doesn't work, you know, just too much at once to make. But it gradually over a period of time when you're in those associations and in those groups. And now that's why I've started, I spent, I put my podcast, Ethan on hold in January so I could start this community. And we're just getting going back on it now. So I got a place for people to go because I know that's where multiple more change is going to happen inside that, you know, it's a place for a bucket, but there's these other buckets that are out there. Like, how did you find out about that entrepreneur group?

It was actually an old college buddy of mine, we caught up and we were actually at a party, a kid's birthday party. We were the only two entrepreneurs in the room. And he pulled me to the side and was like, hey, how's business? And. And he told me, and I told him it was, this was around the time when we were struggling in a, in a tough place. And he said, hey, have you ever heard of EO Entrepreneurs Organization? I said, no, I haven't. And he told me about it. But that at that time, you know, entrepreneurship can be lonely. And I didn't have a circle. I didn't have anyone to talk to because most of my peers that I, my college buddies, they were, they were working, they were employees, nine to fivers. So who do I have to talk to when I can't meet payroll? Who can relate to that? That's why I leaned into EO and several other organizations once. I quickly saw the benefit of it. And in addition to everything that you just said, another benefit of community is you can learn so much from other businesses that aren't even in your sector. So, you know, for example, as we were growing, you know, I was trying to scale this business that where we made custom jackets where each, each piece is custom. It's hard to scale something that's custom. You know, it's easier to scale something that's simple. But someone in my group said, hey, you check out Dell Computers. And I went and I grabbed Michael Dell's book and read it because Dell Computer, they allow you to customize computers. So. But they scaled it to a multi billion dollar company. So I applied some of those same principles to my business, even though it was a completely different industry. So we can, you know, you gotta like keep your eyes open, talk to people, don't be an island, talk to peers. And you become what, what is the phrase? You're the Sum of the five people you interact with the most. Right? So if you hang around five millionaires, you're not a millionaire yet. You'll probably be one soon. But if you, if you hang around five people who are overweight, broke out of shape and unhappy, you're gonna be that sixth person. So you really need to carefully choose your network, choose your circle. And if your circle is not also trying to empower you to get to the next level, then it's not a circle, it's a cage.

Well, you've reinforced my thinking, so I'm glad to hear you say it. That why I started the podcast about three or four years ago was the fact that all this time I'd been pretty much working in financial services. And I wanted to bring open that community up to the fact that it's just not that winning in financial services. Opening offices, growing organizations, training people, these are techniques that are transferable to all industries. And I thought that this would bring some fresh blood into that world. But that's exactly the point, that these are duplicatable and transferable techniques. And again, it goes back to the most powerful concept I had, I learned or heard early on is great ideas, don't care who use them, and great techniques. Michael Dell's ideas don't have to just stay in the computer world. They can go into the embroidery business, the custom clothing business, and all a lot of other businesses. So thanks so much. I hate that we've run out of time. This, we just flown through this thing. Ethan, this has been phenomenal. We'll have to immediately get you back rebooked. But I always like to give my congratulations to you on a phenomenal career so far because I feel like your impact is just starting because you've got the great foundation and obviously you got a lot of energy and you communicate so well. And that's important where it's one thing to know things, it's another thing to be able to pass it on to other people. And what's good for us when we do that, it helps reinforce it in our own minds. But it really is like turning on a light bulb for the people who are on the way up or they, they're dealing with things, you know, it's the first time for them. You know, they'll probably be better at us at figuring it out down the road, but right now they need to know what we know. So thanks so much. You're really good communicator. You got a tremendous track record. Looking forward to seeing how you explode going forward. And you know, your impact. And so what would you say to wrap this up? I'd like to give my guest a final word as we wrap things up. What would you offer as a final word?

Well, first I want to say, Larry, thank you and congratulations to you on this amazing platform that you built on this amazing podcast. And thank you for being such a positive force in people's lives. For those of you who are just listening to this, go and watch the video because Larry's wearing an amazing hat that says hustle. One word, Hustle. And it's a great looking hat. And, Larry, I love your energy and you gotta have that hustle. So I want to leave your listeners with one thought. It's this. Life doesn't come with a level playing field. You got to level the field yourself. And the tools are out there. It's easier than ever now. It's been democratized. You can fire up ChatGPT and you have PhD level knowledge, engineering level knowledge right at your fingertips, and everybody has it. But you got to lean in and learn how to level the playing field yourself. And you can do it.

All right, thanks so much, Ethan. This has been fantastic, man. Look forward to the next time.

All right, thanks a lot, Larry.