Speaker 1Hey guys, Ryan here, and I got news. My old brand that I sold back in 2017 for $16 million and then was bankrupt a couple years later, and then I bought back for pennies on the dollar, and then was doing almost no sales is now back over $100,000 a month in sales. The last 30 days have been the first time that we've passed $100,000 per month in sales since I took the company back. Now, if you're new here, here's how we got to this point. In 2013, I started a company with my friend and business partner, Matthew, and we were selling supplements on Amazon. We started it with $600, and we took that to a $16 million valuation four years later, and we sold it to a private equity group. But we didn't get that full $16 million. We didn't get that full $16 million upfront. We had some money that was carried over in the deal, and we also had some equity still on the table. When all was said and done, we got $10 million about to split between the two of us. However, a few years after we sold the company, the big private equity group that we thought was going to take the business to $50 million or $100 million, they bankrupted the business. Why? Well, that's a story for another day. But let's just say that. This group probably should not have been trying to run e-commerce businesses. However, I got the opportunity to buy the business back, and I bought it back for pennies on the dollar. It was a scuffle out of the gate, but about seven or eight months ago, the team and I started changing what we put our focus into, and now the business is back over $100,000 per month. So today, I'm going to share with you what we did. I'm going to share with you the test. We ran that worked, the ones that didn't work. I'm going to share with you the strategies that are working better today than they did 10 years ago. In fact, that's the thing that has amazed me the most, is that the strategies that built the company 10 years ago are the same one that's taking it back to a seven-figure run rate. Now, I want to give full disclosure here. It's early. A $100,000 business is milestone one in e-commerce. Yes, we got a million dollars. We got a million-dollar business, or at least we're pacing that, and I do think that we'll do $2 million plus over the next calendar year, but it's early, which means that I could do a video in a month saying that we lost one of our products, or that we got some really bad reviews, and now we're back down below that threshold, and we got some catching up to do. But I want to add that we got to $100,000 per month, despite the fact that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Amazon shut down. More than one of our listings. One of our products had over 200 reviews removed overnight. One of our products got pulled from Amazon, and we had to start the whole thing over. We received a fake patent claim, a fraudulent patent claim that almost sank our best-selling product, and two service providers fired me for being difficult to work with. Can you imagine that? Me being difficult to work with. So despite all of these setbacks, we still got. We got to $100,000 per month, and I am going to share with you how. Once again, we started this company. Once again, I started this very same business in 2013 with $600, sold it four years later for $16 million, but I didn't get all of that money up front. I also didn't get millions of dollars of that ever because the company eventually went bankrupt. But while the company. Was going bankrupt, I was publishing a book called 12 Months to $1 Million that went on to become a bestseller. So tens of thousands of people, then eventually hundreds of thousands of people were reading this book, and at the same time, a press release is going out saying that this company that I wrote the book about is going bankrupt, and I did not want the story to end there. However, when I got the call to have the opportunity to buy the business back. I at first said no. I didn't think that it was worth what they wanted for the business. It also wasn't my company anymore. It wasn't my vision. It wasn't the product line that my partner and I built together. I didn't get my partner back. He has moved on to other opportunities at this point, and I wasn't sure that I could turn the whole thing around. But we kept negotiating, and then I found myself daydreaming about what I would do next. What I would do when I had the company back. But then we started negotiating, and I found myself daydreaming about what I could do if I got the company back. And plus, I had all these people who had read my book, and they were seeing this company called Sheer Strength that looked more like Shit Strength, or at least Shambles Strength, because it was in shambles by the time that people were discovering it after reading this book, and I didn't want the story to end that way. I also. Work with a lot of e-commerce sellers and entrepreneurs. I teach people how to get to a million-dollar business. I wrote the book on it. I advise e-commerce companies. I invest in e-commerce companies, and I thought that this might be an opportunity for me to show the methodology that I have been teaching and the things that I advise people to do and show it in a live case study. And if I can do it on a company that is in shambles and show. Show the turnaround plan and also prove that the same playbook that worked back in 2013 to build this business the first time, if it still applies more than 10 years later, well, that would basically prove that the model works. So I took the company back over, cast a new vision, and we got to work. Now, let me start by explaining the state of where the company was when we took the brand back over. For context, when we. When we sold the company back in 2017, it was doing about a million dollars per month in sales, or about $10 million a year. As recently as a year or a year and a half ago, the business was doing $500,000 a year. That is a full 95% drop in sales. 90% plus of the sales were gone. Why? Because they weren't following a predictable playbook anymore. They weren't building relationships with their customers anymore. They weren't building an audience anymore. We found out that the Instagram followers were mostly fake. The email list that we inherited was dubbed the worst email list that an agency had ever seen. They ended up refunding our money and saying, sorry, we can't help you with this email list. The products were expiring. The product line did not match what I wanted to bring to the world. So, there was six to 12 months of just keeping this thing on life support while we sold through old inventory, while we tried to figure out how to send emails to this list that was going to spam, while we cleaned up some of the social media, while we formulated new products. It was a total cluster. And it took six to 12 months. And I realized. And I realized that new starts or restarts are harder than new starts. I would way rather just have a fresh company than try to turn around a total shit show. But that's what this was. We had to turn around the product line, sell through the stuff that we didn't want anymore, launch new products, clean up all of the stuff that was going on before we could actually get to work. And that's when, earlier in 2024, we brought on a brand manager to partner with me and I would set the vision, he would hit the buttons, and we would collaborate on strategy. Shout out to you, Shane. Great work over the last six months. We hired two agencies to help us during this time. One was an email marketing agency that was there to bring life back to the email list. And they fired us because they said, you know what? They said it was the worst email list they had ever seen. They couldn't help us. Here's your money back, they said. The second agency, well, let's just say they wanted us to look like a different brand than who we wanted to be. And they decided we were difficult to work with, and they gave us our money back too. Nobody even wants to work with us on this crappy brand. It was a total redo. We had to start from scratch. So in March. March of 2024, we started some new experiments, and we started playing with new ideas. We launched on TikTok Shop. We started partnering with influencers. We started using the new TikTok Shop platform, which is a huge opportunity. But we just couldn't get it to work for us. It just wasn't the right time, and we didn't have the right experience to be able to make that the full focus of the business. So as of this recording, I still haven't figured out TikTok Shop. It's still not my skill set. huge opportunity, but it hasn't panned out for us. So in June of 2024, I finally took a dose of my own medicine. Felt like we were just getting beat up. We were just hitting wall after wall with this brand while we try to turn things around and correct the wrongs of the past. And I would tell somebody just start from scratch. Just use what you can with the assets that you have and put all of your focus into getting one product back to 25 sales a day. I wrote the book on the third grade math formula of four products at 25 sales a day is 100 sales a day. And at a $30 price point, that's a million dollar business. So let's put all of our attention into just getting light. Moving into this business again. And that's what we did in June of this past year. We took the assets that we had and we put it all into the product that we believed was the highest quality product that had the highest potential for really happy customers. Now, remember our email list that we inherited from this old owner had not been emailed in two years. And I didn't even know if the customers knew who we were anymore. All of the emails would go to spam, all of them, but still some people opened to them. So I finally said, all right, if I can get a few hundred people to pay attention to these emails, even if they're going to spam, if somebody is going in there and opening these emails in spam, then maybe that customer still knows who we are and wants to work with us. They still want to be a customer. They still remember us. So we just sent out as many emails as possible to see who would open. And then we tried to engage those customers. And then we took the people who opened the emails and we put them into a fresh list and treated them like VIPs. And we sent them offers and we tried to reestablish credibility and a relationship with them. Because I knew that if I had even a small group of people that cared about this brand again, and wanted to buy our products, that would be enough to at least get the ball moving on one of these products. So that's when we put all of our attention into promoting that one product in the line that we believed was of the highest quality. That was in June of 2024. And at that time, the sales were under $40,000 a month. And by the time we had finished promoting that product, we had sold it to a lot of people. And we had sold it to a lot of people. And relaunching it, sales of the brand were closer to $50,000 a month. That's a nice bump. But then we got a patent claim. If you're not in the supplement world, you might not know how this works. But there are basically patent trolls that go around and claim that you are in violation of a patent. And then they threaten a lawsuit. And then they try to settle with you. And it can be really scary. But if you're not in the supplement world, you might not know how this works. But if you're not in the supplement world, thankfully, I had dealt with this exact patent troll, this person claiming that we were in violation of a patent, back when we ran the company the first time. And I knew that we were not in violation of this patent. And so we fought it, and we fought it, and we fought it. It took months. During that time, the product was down on Amazon. So the thing that we're putting all this attention into, we couldn't drive more traffic to, because Amazon was reviewing the patent violation. It took months. So we're starting over again. Thankfully, we were launching a second product at that time. We were ready to put attention into launching another product. And the inventory hit, and we put everything into that launch. I wrote more than a dozen emails, personally, more than a dozen launch emails hitting this launch really hard. And that launch really took off. Within a few weeks, that product was doing about $1,000 a day in sales. That's a really good start after a launch. Until that product failed a test and got pulled. Basically, what happened here is that there was a miscommunication on the formulation. And as a result, one of the ingredients in this product had too many extracts in it. And Amazon caught the mistake before we did. And they said, you can't sell that. It's marked wrong. You got to pull this product, and you got to start over. And we just kept getting hit in the nuts. We just kept getting kicked around over and over again. From agencies, to products being pulled, to patent claims, to failed testing. I'm almost ready to give up. I'm like, are you kidding? There's just nothing is going in our favor. But there were two saving graces that kept some optimism at this time. The first one was that one of the products that we had inherited from the previous owner had always done fairly well. There was one product that did a reasonable amount of sales with a decent amount of profit. And as we promoted these other products, the sales of that product started to climb. And we also tested some images that made the conversion rate go up. And our pay-per-click traffic was converting at a reasonable rate. And people were adding it to subscribe and save. So we started doing more aggressive promotions for the subscribe and save. And that product started to do a healthy amount of sales. So that was a saving grace, number one. We had a little bit of momentum on that product. The second saving grace, was even though we had two launches that ultimately resulted in products getting pulled, we proved that we had an audience here. The email list was not dead. The customer list was not totally tuned out. We had something to work with. We had two products launch that we got to 25 sales a day. They just both got pulled. So we knew that if we get these products back in stock, or if we launch additional products, we have a pipeline. We have a distribution route to get these products to 25 sales a day, which is about $1,000 a day in sales. So we would need three of them, maybe four, to have a million dollar business. So after several months of fighting this patent claim, we finally won the dispute, got the product listed again, and we relaunched it to the list, and we launched it hard. We put all of our attention into promoting this product, and it very quickly popped to about 25 sales a day. And thank goodness we created a great fricking product. I'm embarrassed if any of you go look up the brand. It's Sheer Strength, if you're not familiar. It's a supplement company. It's for dads on a fitness journey. I am a dad. I'm 37 years old. I have two kids. I'm making this brand for dads on a fitness journey who want to live a long time, who want to fight father time and run around with their kids and be in good shape, but we're probably not going to be the bodybuilder at the gym. I still wish, you know, that was in the cards for me, but it's not. But I will be the fit dad on the playground. Anyway, where was I? Thank goodness that we had a great fricking product, and people wanted to come back and buy it over and over again. They added it to their subscribe and save. It's, I mean, it's the most expensive nitric oxide booster to make on the market. I'm super proud of the formulation, and it works. So people came back and bought it over and over again, and that little lift from the email list was what we needed to infuse some life into it. We went back to the drawing board and said, can we completely rebrand this? Can we split test different images? Let's split test different copy. Let's just put everything into restarting this, kicking it off from scratch, trying it all over again. Because I knew from previous experience that if you can get a really great product to be a leader in the industry, people will stick with it for a very long time. So I was not afraid of going back to the grind and getting it to 10, 15, then 25 sales a day. We got there quickly, and it stayed around that point because people wanted to come back and buy it again and again. So now we had two products doing 25 sales a day, or about $1,000 a day, and it was then time to launch product number three. We launched product number three, which was a thermogenic. It's basically a metabolism enhancer. It's basically like a supplement alternative to Ozempic or any of the GLP-1 drugs that you see around. This is not a drug. It's not as effective as a drug. drug. It basically works with the same mechanisms as those drugs. You see how I'm trying to stay like legally compliant in this video? This video is for entrepreneurs. I don't care if you buy my supplements. I'd actually prefer it if you don't. It'd be kind of weird. Don't look up the brand. It's super early. Our packaging is still subpar. Our website sucks. I haven't done all the things I want to do, but we're still doing 100K a month. Finally. Anyway, we launched product number three and that thing was a screamer. I mean, it just came right out of the gate at 15, 20, then 25 sales a day. Within a month, it was doing about 30 sales a day, more than a thousand dollars a day in sales. And we were pacing about $3,000 a day in sales, give or take. That was 45 days ago. So before that launch, the brand was doing between 50 and $60,000 per month in sales. We launched this new product. It's doing a thousand dollars a day in sales. So we jump up to 75 to $85,000 a day, a day, I wish. $85,000 a month in sales, give or take. Now we have just been improving those listings, adding reviews, and they're still doing a lot of sales. So we're doing a lot of sales. Bumps and bruises along the way. We still don't have one of our products back that needed to be reformulated. We still have not done any of the influencer marketing that I want to do. Our packaging still needs a bunch of improvements, but the plan still works. The simple plan of launching good products and getting reviews and split testing the copy and the images and being aggressive. With pay-per-click and getting people onto auto-ship. These were all basic parts of the strategy that as soon as we were cleared of the old story, as soon as we were cleared of the old inventory, we could put all of our attention into driving those launches and those new products. And it was three months, three months. We went from 40 or $50,000 a month to having our first $100,000 a month. And that was simply because we found the right product. We found the right product. We found the distribution pipeline, $1,000 a month. Now to me, again, that's the first milestone. That could change. It could go down. It could go up. But based on this trajectory and what I've seen in this type of business, it's perfectly in the realm of possibility for us to double again over the next four to six months and have a low seven figure, two and a half to $3 million next year. And that's the first milestone. And that's the first That would be a really good, it would be a really good follow-up year to this one. So what were the things that drove that growth? They were rewarming up the customer list. There was a lot of attention put into just seeing what we had, what customers were still there, who's still paying attention. So what were the things that we did in order to drive that growth? The most important thing was the fact that we put our attention into bringing in new products. We put our attention into bringing in new products. Breathing life back into the customer list. The customer list was neglected. It was dead. All the emails went to spam. But I knew that if we just had a few hundred people, that would be enough to at least kick off a round of sales for any product that we release. You don't need that many people in order to have a really good product launch. This is why people in the 1% have $25,000 launches with very small email lists and almost no social media following. It's because you don't need that many people. So I guess led by example here and said, give me the list. If I can resuscitate a few hundred people that care, that would be enough. And that's exactly what happened. We didn't have any launch that was blown out of the water, but it was enough momentum to get a product to $10,000. And then a hundred reviews. And then some of those people would add to subscribe and save on Amazon. And then that was enough reviews for us to drive pay-per-click traffic. And that got the ball rolling. So the most important piece is the fact that we breathe life back into the email list. I would say the second thing that we did was we put emphasis into getting people onto Autoship. We put emphasis into getting people onto Autoship. And we started split testing different things on the listing to improve the conversion rate. Some people will just throw up their Amazon listing and then walk away. And that's a huge missed opportunity. I'm surprised at how little thought people put into optimizing things. You know, I come from the direct response marketing world where you are split testing all kinds of things. And the name of the game is out-converting everybody else. And when you can think about not how do I win today, but how do I win over the next year, you realize that little incremental improvements stack up over a long period of time. So that was the second thing that worked really well for us. The third thing was putting a lot of focus into product quality. Now our packaging, not the best, at least out of the gate. We've fixed that 80%. But the product quality itself, I would put up against anybody in the space. So I knew that I could be aggressive getting the product into people's hands because they were likely to come back and buy more. They were likely to leave positive reviews. If our marketing was on point and if the customer service was really strong, the product had enough quality to bring people back. And then we milk every product. We milk every product. We milk every piece of positive feedback. Every review, turn it into a social media post. Use it as a reason to email the list. Just stoking the fire of that small audience to come back and support you and celebrate all the feedback that you're getting. That was an important step forward for us. Once we had three products doing reasonably well, we were pacing $3,000 a day. And we're now pacing on average about $4,000 a day. So over the last year, we've been doing a lot better. We've been we're sitting right at $100,000 in a month. And the trajectory is up. Again, we still have another product coming back because we've reformulated it. And I think we'll be at about $150,000 a month, maybe even $200,000 a month over the next couple of months. Throughout this process, I have learned a few really important lessons. The first is that having a compelling medium to long-term vision is not just a fluffy, feel-good story. It is vital to a brand and a business working out. If I had just been trying to sell some products on Amazon, I would have quit. Or I never would have purchased the business. I would have never tried to bring it back to life. When we got kicked in the teeth because a product got pulled, that would have been a good reason to quit. When we got a patent violation, if I didn't believe in what we were trying to do or believe in a one to three year vision, then why would I fight the patent claim? I would have just reformulated and launched a different product. But I believed in that product. I believed in what we were doing. I believed that it was the best solution for dads on a fitness journey. So we fought the patent claim and we won. And we got punched in the mouth and got back to work. I did not go back into this business until I knew what the first four products were going to be. And I could envision the product suite being the perfect stack for our target customer. And I could imagine what the branding would look like even though we didn't get it done in time and it's still being rewarded. I didn't know what the products were going to be. And I believed in every single thing that the company does, product and marketing wise. My secret weapon in this business is the fact that I don't need the cash flow from this business to pay for my life. It's a serious advantage to be able to think about driving growth instead of maximizing cash flow. I am willing to spend enough pay-per-click advertising to be breakeven or even a small loss. Why? Because I know some percentage of those people are going to get on auto ship. Some percentage of those people are going leave reviews. Some of those people are going to come back and buy other products. And the net margin on the business has been very healthy. I actually set a budget of being willing to lose $100,000 to make this business work over the course of a year. It's actually consistently profitable. I want to be more aggressive than what we're being right now because I don't need the money from this business. When I look at my most successful students, they, for the most part, have other forms of income or they have security while they're waiting for their business to hit a certain point. Now, over time, they lived on the cash flows, but while they were growing the business to the first million, all of that money stays in the business. It compounds until you're at at least 60%. $60,000 to $80,000 a month. If you're in scarcity mode trying to extract from the business, it's kind of like having a baby that is two years old and you're like, why haven't you gone to work yet? Why aren't you bringing home food for the family? It's two. It needs your energy more than it can provide. That's what a business is in the early stages while you're ramping up. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs fail not because their business wasn't, a good idea, not because their product wasn't good, not because they're a bad entrepreneur, but because they're so in a hurry to take money out of the business that the business doesn't have the resources to be able to hit that point of profitability where they could pay themselves. My partner and I, the first time, did not pay ourselves in this business until it was doing at least $100,000 a month. He had a full-time job and I had copywriting clients. That's how I was paying for my life. And this time around, I have other businesses, which are also distractions. I also have children now, so my life is more expensive, but I pay for my life in ways that are not related to this business and I let all of the profit roll back into the business to do more promotions and more product launches and product rebranding and upgrading our packaging. That's where the money is best spent. And I don't care if I take money from this business until it's an eight-figure business again, and then we can have another massive exit, or we can just hold on to a really great business for a really long time. So if you are starting a business to make money, you can get there, but not in the short term. The business needs more resources than you do, and I see a lot of entrepreneurs try to starve the business to pay themselves, and that gets them into a lot of trouble. The third lesson is that there is no replacement for a responsive audience. Even though our list was declared dead, it was declared the worst email list of all time. It hadn't been emailed in over two years. We were still able to warm up a small but responsive group of people that wanted to buy our products. This is why when I'm working with an entrepreneur or I'm advising someone, we often are going back to the basics of audience building. Do you have 100 people on an email list? Do you have 100 people who will leave a review for a product? That's the beginning of being independent of Amazon. It's the beginning of being able to launch on other platforms or have predictable product launches. I do not understand how entrepreneurs get into this game without thinking about it. I have no idea how they do it. Maybe it's just the only way that I know how to build businesses, but our audience, as small as it was, carried the launch of those products, and it resulted in us getting reviews and getting feedback and pushing the momentum to Amazon, which rewarded us in the form of free traffic because we were sending traffic to them. There's no replacing a responsive service. That's the only way that we can do it. The fourth thing that I learned is that you can only do a few things well at a time, but that's all that you need. One thing going well can pay for nine things not going well, but it's often difficult to find what is going to work really well when you're scattered amongst nine different ideas. To this day, our website sucks. Our social media isn't very good. We haven't launched that podcast that I really want to launch that's branded to the company. I haven't even finished the book that I wanted to write when I started this project. Yeah, that one's taken me way too long. TikTok hasn't worked out for us. I don't even think we're listed on walmart.com. I haven't finished that backend telehealth offer that I wanted to have alongside this business once it launched. I haven't taken up the relationships that I have on the table for influencers that I wanted to work with. None of that has happened. These are all things that I thought were going to be very important to the success of the brand. Almost nothing that we've tried has worked, and yet it's a million-dollar business again, and we're just getting started. Why? Because one thing did work, and it was warming up the internet. It was warming up the internet. It was warming up the audience, launching products to them, and getting reestablished on Amazon. And now we have the runway, the profitability, and the momentum to be able to invest into these other things that will amplify the brand, and the authority, and the buy-in from the customer base. Now we can focus on one or two of those things, but up until now, they've just been distractions from the main thing, which is getting a core group of products to consistent sales so that it's a $100,000 a month business again. And finally, the fifth lesson that I learned is that the actual playbook hasn't changed much in 10 years. The thing that got us back to $100,000 a month ended up being the exact same playbook that got us there 10 years ago. In fact, it's the same business. It's the same or similar product line. It's a slightly different person, but it's still men on a fitness journey. I'm still the person. 10 years ago, I wanted to be a big rip buff dude in the gym. Now I want to be a fit dad. So the person is the same. The product line is the same. The branding is mostly the same. Why did that work so well the first time, and then go bankrupt, and now it's working again? Was it timing? Was it being early? Well, we're not early anymore. Was it the super secret strategy? Was it funding? Well, the private equity group was way better funded than we were. It was simply being focused on the very simple strategy of launching products, getting reviews, building good customer relationships, having high converting listings, and when we sold the company, the new owners got away from that. They started doing magazine ads and trying to get into Costco. What? Why? Not the right time, not the right strategy for this brand. Now that we've taken it back over, going back to the basics of launching to a small audience, getting them back up and moving again, and now we can complicate it if we want. We often get so distracted with the shiny object of what everybody else is doing. Guess what? Same playbook, same strategy from 10 years ago is what is taking this back to a million dollar business. And we did it. We really did it in like five months. There was a lot of time clearing out old inventory and old products and warming up the customer list. But once that was done, we've had consistent growth. Month over month until the 100K point. Looking forward, we've still got products that we want to launch that we want to bring to life. And we still need to get better at some basics. Like we need to get better at review strategies. We still have some design and branding and packaging things that I'm not fully happy with. And currently we're aggressively testing copy and images to improve our conversion rate. And we're still working to warm up the email list even more. But honestly, our focus needs to be doing the things that we're doing right now, but better. Not adding more strategies to the plate. We don't need to go launch on Walmart. We don't need to get onto TikTok shop and crush it there. We can do those things, but it's easier to double a business that's already working in a very specific lane, it will be much easier to double the business from $100,000 a month to $200,000 a month, just doubling down on what's working, doing a better job at that than pursuing all of these other avenues. Those other avenues are good ideas, but it's easier and more straightforward to just get better at what's currently working. We still have a long way to go, but it feels really good to get the first $100,000 a month out of the way. I remember having this feeling the first time. Wow, I actually just had this really weird flashback. I remember when we hit $100,000 a month the first time, and this is weird. I swear I'm not making this up and I just realized this. I was sitting right here. The weird way that life worked, I ended up moving back into the same apartment, that I lived in when I grew the business the first time. That's its own story, but I was actually sitting right here, and I was recording a podcast. Whoa, that's trippy. I was recording a podcast where I realized that we were at $100,000 a month, and it felt different to be at $100,000 a month. It felt different to say it's a million-dollar business, and it feels different this time. To say it's at $100,000 a month. It still doesn't feel like a company. It still doesn't feel like this mature business. It feels like a small brand that's showing signs of life. We've got a long way to go, but I'm really happy with the progress that we've made. I will keep you posted on the ups and downs of this brand. I'll continue to share what's working and what's not working. If you want to see our resources and the playbook that we follow, you can get it from the link in the description. I'll put it in the description. You can get it for free over at capitalism.com slash playbook. Cool realization is that the brands that I have a majority stake in, now reasonably I can see next year we'll probably do about $5 million in top line. There's three different brands in that portfolio that I want a majority stake in. That will probably do five plus million next year. I also have a portfolio of brands I've invested in as a minority investor, and a few of those are doing really well. It feels like this really fun point where the portfolio is popping again, and that's a good feeling. In the next year, the focus will be on partnering, buying, or investing in a few core brands from the community that I mentor and bringing a couple of those into the portfolio so that we can partner them all up and have a really big exit in the future. We'll be looking to partner with or add to the portfolio 10 or so brands over the next few years so that we can take all of the resources in this portfolio and lead them towards a roll-up strategy and have a really massive exit. That excites me. If you want to see how we do that, go over to capitalism.com slash playbook. Thank you for watching. And following along on the journey, I will keep you posted. And if you want to see all of the updates, make sure you're subscribed to the channel. I'd love to see your thoughts in the comments, or you can email me at ryan at capitalism.com. And I'll see you guys on the next episode. Take care.
Speaker 2And now a quick word from Dr. Travis Ziegler, one of our members from the capitalism.com community. I'm Dr. Travis Ziegler. And along with my wife, Dr. Jenna Ziegler, we had our exit in June of 2021. So that was a huge milestone for us, both from making us financially free to getting us out of debt, student loan debt that we've had since we became doctors in optometry school. And when we sold, we were doing close to $450,000 a month. I started with capitalism.com back in 2017, 2016, around that time. And I joined the tribe first, which was the equivalent to the incubator now. The big thing is that we're not going to be able to make a lot of money. And the biggest thing, and I think this is the fear that brings us all back is they're, they're afraid of investing and getting that return on your money. And so my fear of investing in myself, I'd never done anything like that up to that point. And my wife wasn't there. And I joined without consulting her, which was, I don't recommend doing that, but it was probably one of the best decisions we've ever made because it's just amazing what an investment in yourself with capitalism.com has done for us. You know, nothing changes after like an exit or a financially freeing exit or anything like that. But how's our life different from joining capitalism.com? It's, it's our, it's our therapy. It's Ryan is known as the entrepreneur's therapist for a reason. And it's because when you talk to him, he gets you out of your own head. But if you join, this is a proven system. I mean, people have gone through this and they've, they've come out the other side better. If you join this and you don't get results, it's up here. It's not, it has nothing to do with the course. It has nothing to do with the people that are in capitalism.com. It has to do with you. You need to look in the mirror because you can get the exact same course as the person sitting right next to you. And you guys will both have two different results. And it's all because the mentality that you take into the course, if you go into it or joining the networking or the mastermind, if you go into it with a negative attitude that this isn't going to work, it's not going to work for you. So don't join it. But if you go in ready to go, it's going to work. It worked for me. It's going to work for you too. It's just, you got to steer or jump over the mental hurdles because believe me, you will hit roadblocks. Like you wouldn't believe both in your personal life and in your business life. And that's what this is here for. It's here to help you get through those.
Speaker 1If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book, 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in at capitalism.com slash one. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list. And if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business and find out what we do over at capitalism.com slash Inc. That's capitalism.com slash I N C.
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