A couple of days ago, I shared an idea with ya...
I wanted to take notes on my favorite podcasts with my biggest takeaways and then share those takeaways with you. I don't know anyone else who offers anything similar. People write book notes and notes from conferences... But I've never seen anyone sharing their thoughts on their favorite podcasts.
Today, I'm sharing my notes from Mike Dillard's latest episode of Self-Made Man.
It's called: Thinking Bigger: Inside Ryan Moran’s Strategy To Build A 9-Figure Business Empire…
I highly recommend it. Every entrepreneur should listen.
Here are my notes:
Ryan Moran's dream is to eventually own the Cleveland Indians. Having a goal like this serves as a filter to make decisions. Every decision becomes "does this take me closer or further away from my ultimate goal?"
Once you're successful, what do you do next? What's your next goal? Once you're no longer working for the money because you have enough, you need something to strive for.
With the goal of owning the Indians, Ryan avoids shiny objects, new business opportunities, and things like Bitcoin. He puts all of his focus on doing what he's best at to take him one step closer to his goal.
Ryan has a strategy to build an empire of businesses that he can influence.
He sees people like Carl Icahn and Tim Ferriss, who can simply mention a company and the business gets a boost. He's looking to create that kind of influence for himself.
Ryan just sold a company for an 8-figure exit. He built a company that sold health supplements and he got to $1m pretty quickly, mostly through selling on Amazon and getting it in around 1,000 retail stores.
He hired a private equity firm to acquire a majority of the company and he exited operations. He wanted to watch what this firm did to take the business to the next level.
Kamal Ravakant told him the first thing he should do with his money is to hold on to it. Don't go immediately invest it or buy anything. You need to get used to seeing that kind of money in your bank account so that kind of wealth is normal to you. Sit on it for 6-12 months.
After about 6 months, he invested a little bit of it into some of his student's companies and purchasing high-yield debt, connected to real estate and internet businesses. He'll get return on that pretty much forever.
He learned a lot from the new buyers.
Ryan was used to buying a company and then being the boss. He'd hire help for things he needed to offload but he ran the business. The private equity group, however, hired a team as their first course of action. They hired people that had built companies like this before. They weren't the boss, they weren't super involved, they brought in the people who could best grow the company.
They hired a CEO first and a financial person second.
Ryan realized that he had tried to run all of his previous businesses himself instead of take an ownership role. Warren Buffett doesn't run Pepsi...
The private equity group was more about their Rolodex than their processes. When he asked what they intended to do with the business, they didn't talk about a game plan, they talked about getting the right people in place to create the game plan.
Ryan realized that he is where he is more because of who he knew than any specific system or process.
Now when hiring, he looks at who people know as well as their skillset.
Ryan learned from Gary V. Gary's singular skill was branding. His model was to acquire businesses, apply his secret sauce to them, grow them, then sell them. Gary gets to focus on his core superpower. This concept really hit home with Ryan.
Ryan's strength has been to grow physical product brands. Big brands are starting to buy up small brands.
Ryan plans to acquire companies that he can apply his skillset to while also focusing on building his influence like Tim Ferriss and Carl Icahn so that what he says has impact on company's growth. He's also hiring the right people to scale companies instead of focusing on running things himself.
Ryan bought Capitalism.com to grow a media property. He wanted a megaphone where he could talk about stuff that would influence business growth. He's building an executive team that can help him scale that site.
What Ryan looks for when putting together his teams:
- Have they done it before?
- Are they passionate about what they do?
- Do they bring a Rolodex of help and expertise with them?
The same principles above apply to Ryan himself when he looks at opportunities to pursue.
Getting to $1m isn't hard. Just know your product and how many you need to sell per day and just get your marketing dialed in to get to that number of sales. He used Amazon and a handful of products to get there.
It's a completely different skillset to move to 8-figures. The focus is less about selling and more about building an audience.
When you have a platform, you can sell whatever you want to them and test what works.
A lot of people release things into the marketplace that a lot of other people are selling as well because there's an opportunity. But then they never put focus on reinvesting to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market.
You need to build a brand that people trust if you want repeat buyers. That's also what someone would look for when looking to acquire a company.
Ryan's life amplified when he did 2 things:
- When he focused on building a brand that was bigger than himself.
- When he started focusing on growing his network. - Your network is your net worth.
Ryan started putting on conferences to grow his network. He paid speakers that he wanted to learn from to grow his network and then would sell tickets to offset the costs. He got to learn from these people, make his money back from ticket sales, and share the content of these experts with everyone who attended.
"Events are a terrible business model but they are the quickest way to uplevel your network."
This is also a huge benefit to running a podcast.
Learn from Ryan at:
I hope you enjoyed this podcast review! I'd love your thoughts on this concept!
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