Saying No to Easy Money and Starting from Scratch with Ryan Moran

Entrepreneur, Investor, Actor, Comedian, Marketing Consultant, World Travel, and Writer – Ryan Moran

Today we have my good friend Ryan Moran in person! Ryan is only 25 and has had an amazing business journey already. He made amazing money early on, but realized it wasn’t only about the money. He ended up giving it ALL up and almost going broke so he could love what he did and do it with integrity. Learn how he built up his new business FAST and better than the last one!

Go to FreedomFastlane.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show I am here, in person, with Ryan Moran. He actually has a podcast too, it's called "Freedom Fast Lane", you can check it out at FreedomFastlane.com. He's also a serial entrepreneur which means I'm not going to list all of the businesses that he has because he has quite a few. Thank you so much for allowing me to come here today.

Ryan: Of course. Thanks for coming over, Jaime.

Jaime: We were supposed to record yesterday via Skype and we only live 20 minutes away so I was like "Can I come over?"

Ryan: It's kind of ridiculous. Let's just do it at someone's house.

Jaime: I know. "Can I come over, Ryan" Thankfully we were friends before so it wasn't weird.

Ryan: That's a lie. She just put that in the podcast. It was really creepy.

Jaime: Exactly. So let's go over this. Why don't you tell us, because you're really young - how old are you?

Ryan: How old do you think I am?

Jaime: Don't ask me that. I think about 25.

Ryan: I'm 26.

Jaime: 26, okay. When was your very first business?

Ryan: My first business, I was five years old and I went door to door in my neighborhood selling hand drawn pictures for a penny each. I made four cents that night. Thank you. 100% profit, by the way, because my dad bought all of the computer paper and the pencils.

Jaime: You were all set. You were profitable at age five.

Ryan: And then I was like "I need to get on Eventual Pennionaire." But now we're here. My first real business, I was 18 years old, I had just graduated high school and I was going to Indiana Western University that was $25,000 a year and I had to pay for it somehow so I just started a blog and an affiliate business where I would just blog about products that I was reviewing and then I got really good at search engine optimization so I got the blog to rank in Google and I sold products to people who would find the blog and I repeated that process a few times with a bunch of different websites where I just got them to rank in Google and made money from the traffic that was coming in. that was my first business.

Jaime: Let's dive into that because that's a skillset. What did you go to school for?

Ryan: I went in Christian ministries, I was going to be a pastor, and then I switched, I didn't see myself doing that for the rest of my life, so it was like "I guess I own a business so I'll study business," so I studied business and economics.

Jaime: Did that degree help you at all?

Ryan: I ran out of toilet paper once and the degree was a lifesaver, let me tell you.

Jaime: You knew the economics of toilet paper. So what made you decide to get into online marketing?

Ryan: I actually thought my business was going to be real estate investing, that show I was going to make my millions while I was a pastor. First I'll raise a few bucks online - and to this day I'm still raising a few bucks online.

Jaime: But eventually you will be an awesome real estate investor.

Ryan: Eventually I'll get there. I do invest in real estate. It's not my business, it's just where I park my cash. My strategy is I earn my money on the internet, I put it into other cash flow streams, which is usually real estate, and then I put that into long term wealth streams. When people ask me for financial advice I say you have your place where you make your cash and then you have a place to park it where it's going to grow and produce more cash.

Jaime: So you think online business is the best place to make cash?

Ryan: Not necessarily, it's just my skillset and it's what I've gotten really good at. I'm not one of those people who says "this is the best way to make cash." I think that there are a hundred vehicles where you can make a lot of cash. The first thing, I think, if people are working a day job or if people are looking to get out of that 9-5, trading their hours for dollars, the first thing I recommend people do is set aside money in their budget every month to put into some investment but the first investment that you need to make is a business that is not tied to the hours that you're working. If we can unhook that connection and forget the lie that we're actually trading our hours for dollars - we're trading our value for dollars - and that first investment is some sort of income stream that is not based on our time, that's the direction everyone should go if they're looking to be free.

Jaime: Awesome. What people are probably thinking right now is that you started eight years ago when it was easier with affiliate marketing and the online stuff and there weren't blogs everywhere, so tell me how you learned then and what's changed now?

Ryan: I think it's way easier now. I'm envious of the people that get in now because when I started we didn't have things like WordPress. Keeping a blog was really fricking hard in 2006. I had to learn HTML and it was in my dorm room hand coding everything. We also didn't have things like outsourcing sites so getting affordable help was impossible back then, or really hard and there wasn't all the awareness and there weren't sites out there where you could go and find assistants that would do the things that were bogging you down, so I was doing everything - all of my customer e-mails, all of my website development, every time a server went down I was the guy trying to fix it and I knew nothing. A kid in my dorm room taught me now to do file transfer protocol or FTP. I wish to this day I did not know, I wish I had never learned that. So I think it's a lot easier now. Back then we to do all of this, I had to do all of this myself, especially as I had no capital to invest in people. Now I think it's way easier to start a business, especially online - really just about anywhere but especially online it's way easier now than it was eight years ago for sure.

Jaime: So those assets negate the fact that it's more crowded than before?

Ryan: I don't really believe in competition. I think we live in a time now where we can really specialize, where we can really drill down on serving one specific target market and because of that there really is no competition. If your business serves a very specific need and a very specific target audience then the worst that can happen is if you don't fill a need you can just, as an affiliate, send those customers elsewhere and you both are compensated for that. I studied economics and there's a term in economics called "competitive advantage", right? I hope that's right.

Jaime: Your degree was totally worth it!

Ryan: I'm sorry, Dr Layman, if you're watching this! But competitive advantage means you focus on what you are best at and you're able to then, we call it, outsource the rest. Whereas before we were in the modern era everyone had to farm, everyone had to protect themselves, everyone had to build their own houses, and then you had this thing called competitive advantage which means one person farms and they trade their goods for someone else's goods and we have that on an extreme level now where you can focus in on one specific target market and even one specific need and you can make $1 million just doing that one specific need and we can outsource the rest, or the economic term is we trade the rest of that time.

Jaime: That's awesome. So tell me, though, how long it took you to learn the beginning skills? Because people that are just starting are like "Yeah, but learning SEO and affiliate marketing and all of that stuff takes forever."

Ryan: May I sideswipe your question with a story?

Jaime: Do it.

Ryan: I have a student, his name is Matt and he's a truck driver, and he's a person who came to one of my events almost exactly a year ago and he sat there and he was like "Man, look, I'm a truck driver, I don't know any of this stuff and I feel overwhelmed with all of the stuff that I have to learn." I was like "Stop - this is perfect. If you don't know anything then you don't have the baggage that the rest of us have, where we think we have to learn everything. Don't learn anything except what is going to drive sales. That is all you need to learn and you can go and find people to do everything else because those other things don't put money in your pocket." He kept saying "How do I learn this?" and I would not answer the question. "You are not to learn that - if you learn that, I will come to your house and pee on your lawn and I will eat asparagus beforehand so your whole lawn will smell." He was like "No, just teach me how to do graphic design!" and I said "No!" I wouldn't teach him how to do anything and as a result he now has a six figure business a year later. I was amazed at his timeline.

Jaime: A year?

Ryan: A year later and he had a six figure business, yes.

Jaime: Can you tell us what he did?

Ryan: I've become fairly well known for being somewhat skilled at selling on Amazon.

Jaime: That was very humble.

Ryan: Thanks. People know me, I'm very important, I have many leather-bound books and people know me as the Amazon guy sometimes. But Matt had a business similar to that - he was selling physical products on Amazon.

Jaime: Nice, and it became a six figure business in a year and he didn't learn any skills?

Ryan: As far as I know. Matt, if you're listening, if you did learn something I owe you a pee on your lawn. But I believe that he just stayed out of it and had other people do that.

Jaime: So why is that such a big deal?

Ryan: Because it's so easy to get bogged down on all the details of business. If you've studied business for more than six months then you have probably experienced that sensation of "I have to learn this and this and this," and the truth is that you don't - you need to learn one thing and monetize that one thing and all the other things that come onto your plate can be passed on to someone else. I believe very strongly that entrepreneurs need to be focused on revenue producing activity and/or result driven activity. There's this paralysis that happens that we need to learn something before we take action but learning things does not produce a result. Learning things is not a result-driven activity. So if you look at your day and you ask yourself the question "What am I doing in my day that is producing a result that is getting feedback, meaning I am getting some sort of analysis in terms of sales, customer feedback? I'm looking for some result that comes from action." That is very different from saying "I'm going to prep in order to take action." So if your day is spent preparing activity rather than result-driven activity then we need to reverse that trend.

Jaime: I agree. I make all of my clients stop learning and they're like "What?!" or stop listening to podcasts, which is hilarious. But we do so much stuff, thinking "Eventually I'm going to need this information," and I'm like "How much do you remember of this book you just read?" and they're like "Well?" and it?s like two sentences out of the whole book. it?s a great thing to learn, don?t get me wrong - most of the people that I interview love learning - but when we have a specific goal and a timeframe, if you want to try to get a six figure business in a year, like you said, you?re not the guy reading for 100 hours every month. So tell us about that one thing - because you said that you only need one thing and if I don?t ask you what that one thing is and how we can get that one thing they?ll get mad at me.

Ryan: The one thing for him was marketing his product successfully on Amazon, so we could go into that if you want to but really the important takeaway there was that we were using Amazon as a channel to produce sales for his company. One thing that shortcuts success for most entrepreneurs is that if you have a product or service, look at what channels exist for that product currently, because if you can maximize your product or service?s exposure on a channel then it cuts out you have to go door to door and sell hand drawn pictures for a penny each. There are channels out there, especially online, where products and services are already being transacted. So if you just place yourself in the position of that channel and maximize that channel then you can shortcut the sales process and the profit curve. Whereas most people, they get a product or service and they say "I don?t know what to do with this next. I don?t know where I?m going to get customers," and they think they have to build their own channel. I say look at what channels are already there and place them there. So, for Matt, he had a physical product so we showed him how to perfect the Amazon channel so that sales were coming in and then he could look at other channels and expand his product online.

Jaime: Let?s dive into that, though, because I think that?s really important. People will go "That sounds great. Okay, how the heck do I do that?" So give me an example, if you can, to walk us through how somebody would figure that out.

Ryan: Sure. Online, for physical products, you just have to look at where your customers currently hang out. If you are your own target market, where do you buy things? If they're physical products then it's Amazon, it's eBay and there's one big one in China that I can't remember the name of but it's even bigger than Amazon. If you have digital products it's ClickBank, it's? I'm out of the digital publishing world but there's a bunch of them. ClickBank was the big one when I was big into digital marketing. And for some people's business it's retail and it's the JV game and affiliates are your channel - if you have a really good affiliate network then JVs and affiliates are your channel, so where are people hanging out, where are sales already being generated? And then just learn how that game is played - what are the people who are at the top doing differently than everyone else that is resulting in them being at the top of the channel? Since there are already customers going through channels, then if you put yourself in that position then you get that deal flow, you get those leads and those sales, and that's an empowering position, when you're in a place where you have regular, recurring income coming from a channel, and then you can worry about building your own channels or moving into other channels.

Jaime: So that's really interesting because at the beginning you said you started a blog. That's building your own channel, so you learned the hard way, apparently.

Ryan: Actually I did one thing really well and that was when I started my business I got plugged into Google AdWords, which is a channel - it's a traffic channel. At this time I just failed correctly - I made a bunch of mistakes and fell forward because I didn't know what I was doing but I got plugged into that traffic channel and was able to convert that traffic. I don't know what I did right but I did some things right there and then I went back and learned search engine optimization as a channel and I was still plugging into Google as the channel there and I was learning what the people at the top were doing and how I could do it better so that I would show up in that channel. If I were to do it over again I would not have done it that way.

Jaime: You would tap into something already existing so as to not have to build your own as much?

Ryan: Back then I didn't have my own product, I didn't have my own services, I was just piggybacking off what other people had and then piggybacking off the traffic channel, which was Google, and, once again, we didn't have all of these big channels that exist now so, again, things are way easier now than they were in 2006.

Jaime: How do you find that right thing, though? So we're talking about product, you're talking about physical products, and then people will be like "Okay, that's great, but how do I find a product that doesn't already have huge competition?"

Ryan: I don't care about competition.

Jaime: So ignore that question. But to go through and make sure it has enough profit margin - how do you find it and all of that fun stuff? Since you're the Amazon guy, give us more on that.

Ryan: So we're talking about physical products and Amazon specifically?

Jaime: Sure.

Ryan: So my rules of thumb for people are, if you just go to AliBaba.com and browse. Ali Baba is a place where wholesalers around the world come and manufacture in wholesale and if you just go to AliBaba.com and browse you'll have more ideas coming out your ears.

Jaime: But doesn't everyone do that?

Ryan: Yeah, everybody does that, but there are so many out there. I'm still surprised with some of my students coming back with something they found that they're putting on Amazon as a result. If you just go there you'll have so many ideas coming out your ears and it only takes one good idea and other people can have that idea. I don't care if other people have had that idea before. I actually look for competition when I'm doing this process because if other people are successful in the market that means that market is big enough for me to enter into and do some damage. I prefer to stay out of markets where there is nobody because then it's not a proven concept and then I can't turn that into an automatic cash flow stream. So I'm looking for at least 40% profit margins after shipping, after Amazon fees, after product costs, after everything. That's my target - 40% and up - and that's the barometer that I use if I'm going to be going into that market.

Jaime: Nice, so how do you crush your competition? I like you going into markets and crushing your competition so give us some tactics on that. Everyone's hot on Amazon marketing right now, it's sort of a thing where everyone's all excited - 'All I have to do is this!" But I don't know, is it hard for them to just jump into a market without knowing anything at all and crushing their competition?

Ryan: With physical products I don't think it's that hard at all. Again, I come from the information publishing world. I should actually say I was in the information marketing world for about seven years and did not enjoy it so I was teaching internet marketing a lot more a few years ago and I hated every minute of it.

Jaime: Why? Before you answer the other question, tell me more about that. Why did you hate internet marketing? Because I remember you talking about this before and I find it really interesting.

Ryan: I started that blog back in 2006 and I had some other sites and I became fairly successfully doing those things. As a result, people kept coming to me for advice and somehow I became an expert in internet marketing. I never set out on the path to become an internet marketing guy and yet all of these people kept saying "What products can I buy?", "What can I promote for you?" I made all of these connections, I was going to conferences and everyone was like "I love what you're doing -what can we promote of yours?" I didn't have any products but I made all of these connections so then I was like "Okay, looking at what other people are doing, if I want to become a multi-millionaire, what I really need to do is leverage these."

Jaime: You had a channel right there!

Ryan: Yeah, so I'll just put up some products and I'll get these people to promote them and all of a sudden one thing leads to another and now my whole business is producing products and getting my buddies to mail for them which, in that world, is a very strong "take" mentality. We're going to take as much as possible from each other, from the customers, and I never set out to be one of those guys and I never found it fulfilling in the slightest. Part of me tried to justify it as "I'll go in and I'll be the ethical guy and I'll have the best products and the best sales conversions." It just got emotionally exhausting being in that world that was so "take" oriented because when you're in a "take" mindset then it puts you in a state of lack because it says "I'm here, I need to get this thing," and there's this constant gap of where you are now and what you need to get and it's always the next dollar, the next girl, the next fancy house, the next whatever it is, the next car, and it puts you in a state of lack constantly. In business, when eight hours a day you're thinking about "How do I get more?" that is a fast road to being miserable.

Jaime: Okay, let's talk about this, though, because I just had this conversation the other day with two separate people in mastermind groups of mine because the entrepreneur personality, we're kind of like "more" people. We want to do better, progress, keep moving forward. I see it as both an asset and a liability so how do you, specifically, kind of mitigate that because it was really good for you in some ways to be like "I want more," but also not good in other ways because, like you said, you felt horrible about it all.

Ryan: Well let's flip it and instead of sayingn"How much can I get?" let's say "How much value can I create?" or "How much value can I give?" That sounds really out there but let me explain - when you come at it from a perspective of "What can I give?" or "What can I create?" then it assumes that you already have and you're creating something new, so there's not this gap anymore. We're here and we're expanding and if we come from that perspective of "How do I create more value? How do I produce the best product possible? How do I give even more to my clients and my customers so that they're having more incredible results and as a result I'll have more incredible results'" It's okay to want more but the way that we get more is not by taking because there's no pie that everybody's trying to get their bite of. We create pies - that's what we do as entrepreneurs, we create the pie, we determine how big the pie is - but people who are coming from a "take" mentality have that perspective of "There's this much and I need to get this much and someone else is going to suffer as a result of that." The truth is that we're creating the pie. You determine how big the pie is. So, as a result, when you're coming from a "give" mentality - "How do I make the pie even bigger and, as a result, I'll get even more?" That's how we can manage that desire for more but doing it in a healthy way.

Jaime: I like that. So you don't feel that you could have done that in the industry before?

Ryan: I attempted to and I was never able to do it. I eventually just had to say "I am out of this."

Jaime: Did that change everything for you?

Ryan: Everything.

Jaime: Tell me more.

Ryan: It was very difficult because when you're used to having an income stream and it's an easy income stream and you're good at it and you have connections in it but it doesn't fill you up that's a hard decision, to say "I'm out," and not know what's next - and I didn't, I did not know what was next in that. I just decided to plant some new seeds, as I call it, and see what sprouted. What surprised me is that in just the last 12 months, in less than 12 months, my business is already bigger than any of my businesses were previously

Jaime: Really?

Ryan: Yes, in seven years. Closing that, my business now is already, in one year, bigger than any previous business. Thank you.

Jaime: Givers win! That's a really huge lesson for people, especially for people who are just starting or in the first couple of years of business, who are like "But I have to do this and I have to do this and I want to be successful."

Ryan: "I have to keep this client or this customer who sucks me of energy because I have to make the budget work and I have to be in the black."

Jaime: Exactly, so giving up everything was pretty scary, I'm assuming.

Ryan: It was. The only reason why I didn't do it three years earlier was because of that fear.

Jaime: What made you take that leap? Because that's a huge decision.

Ryan: We hit some roadblocks in that business and I hit the point where I could either continue down this path and hopefully these projects will make sense, these will work out, or I could just cut it. And I thought to myself, I said "Okay, if I had that $100,000 back that I had reserved for this project and I could say I'm just going to cut this now, would I do that? If I could go back in time and cut this project early would I have done it? Yes. Then why am I going forward any longer?" One thing I did smart was when we had started these projects I had set aside a chunk of cash, $100,000, and I said "If this dries up, if this goes away, I will not continue and I will not try to earn it back, I will cut ties with everything," and it ran out. So then it was "Okay, do I push forward or do I say I'm out of this?"

Jaime: Making the decision before, when you had the $100,000, "Oh, when this runs out I'll be done," is way easier than when you're running out and going "Oh, shoot?"

Ryan: Right. I was like "Okay, I could push this forward but I'm not happy doing this anyway. I wish I had gotten out before so why am I continuing one day longer?"

Jaime: And then you cut it all.

Ryan: I cut it all.

Jaime: And then you had no identity.

Ryan: I went through a little of that.

Jaime: That's what's kind of crazy, right? Letting that stuff go is really hard, going "Oh, crap, what do I do now?" When you were in that space of "Oh, crap, what do I do now?" what did you do?

Ryan: I was in a position where I wasn't worried about how I was going to eat but I think every entrepreneur, it's funny, the higher up you go the more this fear exists, of dipping into savings. What do I do? I reserved this money for a rainy day - it's a rainy day now and I'm freaking out. What I did was I just took on some clients in the interim.

Jaime: I hear people saying that - "Oh, I just did this little thing that made me $3-4,000 a month." Your mindset is "I have the cash. I feel abundant in that I have the cash. I don't have to touch it, I can just create another income stream," which is awesome. So how long did you do that for?

Ryan: I did that 6-12 months. I actually still have one. I really enjoyed that client - he was a buddy of mine and we really liked working together. what's interesting is we talked about creating value and I found that I was able, with my clients, to create an immense amount of value very quickly and then, after a certain period, it kind of had diminishing returns so what I did was I went in, I created a lot of value, and that was really fun for me and as the diminishing returns started to go down I went "Okay, I'm out," and my business is starting to grow so we had this going on. So my clients are going down, even though they were still happy and happy to keep paying I didn't feel like I was providing value so we wound those down as the business kept growing and now the business is hear I've kept one client. It's fun to create a lot of value really quickly.

Jaime: That's awesome, and it hasn't even been that long, which is insane. So tell me where the podcasting falls into any of this stuff.

Ryan: I started Freedom Fast Lane as the podcast because once I'd shut down all of my teaching stuff a year and a half ago I didn't have any secrets anymore. I don't have anything to sell anymore so I have no secrets, but I can't not be in front of a microphone - if there's a stage, put me on it!

Jaime: "I need a spotlight!"

Ryan: If there's a spotlight, I want it here, right now. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely true. If you have a stage, please put me on it - I am available for speaking gigs. That's what makes me feel most alive - I can't not talk about business and development and investing so I started a podcast. I had no secrets anymore, so let's just address everything. Sometimes I have people on, sometimes I just rant for half an hour about success tips and that is my outlet for that. That's why I started the podcast.

Jaime: The giving mentality. You're like "I have too much in my head, I have to give."

Ryan: I have to talk about it in some capacity so I started the podcast. I still, one day, want to have products and services again but I have no idea what they would be so in the meantime I just share all of my secrets.

Jaime: For free - get in now! I'm kidding. So if you wanted to have products and services, I'm just interested in this personally, how can you do that differently? That's sort of the same space that you were in before.

Ryan: One of the reasons I haven't gone into that is that I haven't fully reconciled that yet. Part of it is just the old programming of I hated what I was doing and I don't want to do that again. There's nothing wrong with having products and services it's just that the game I was in back then, of rounding up all your buddies and it's your turn, let's all promote you, and then we'd turn them out and it was your turn - "You need to have a crappy product so that we can promote you." It was so draining. Now I'll only do it when it's on my own terms.

Jaime: So it was more or less the industry and the people than the actual thing. Because if you can create massive value, that's what's important.

Ryan: Exactly. If you can create massive value that way out-values the price that people are paying, you're doing a tremendous service, but if you're coming from a "take" mentality of "I'm going to put up this product so that I can take as many dollars from the marketplace as possible," you're going to burn out very quickly.

Jaime: So tell me about it from the other side, of being one of these buyers - there are thousands of these products. Let's say someone wants to start a business and make $5,000 so that they can quit their day job and all of that stuff. But there are so many products and services out there right now and half of them, or more than half, are crappy, like you were saying. It's "Hey, let's make some money!" and it's not even necessarily a great premise. How does somebody mitigate that? How do they know what's going to be good or not good?

Ryan: As a product producer?

Jaime: No, as a buyer.

Ryan: As a buyer?

Jaime: If somebody is thinking "I want to do something on Amazon but Ryan doesn't have a product," I don't know, maybe you do have a product.

Ryan: I don't know.

Jaime: Exactly, so you don't even have a product for it. So if that's something they're interested in how do they know which ones to learn from?

Ryan: I would just say stop buying stuff. If you watch and listen to Eventual Millionaire you probably already know enough. If you've gone through a few courses that you thought were good, you probably know enough, you don't need to go and learn the next thing. But if you're brand new and you're evaluating something I would just say look at the fruit that that product has produced. Look at the results that other people have gotten from certain result-driven activities and, if they are producing the results that you want, maybe it's a fit for you.

Jaime: And they can probably fail. Everybody freaks out about failing but even if they just figure it out on their own, that's what you did.

Ryan: That's true. I'd say the only failure is if you decide to take no action at all or if you learn nothing. That's the only failure. It's really hard to really fail. Okay, rant time - there is a difference between feedback and failure. A big difference. I'm getting all riled up now. If you are positioning yourself or you are producing result-driven activity, you will get some feedback. What people fear is that that feedback will contradict what they hoped would happen. That is not failure; that is feedback - because we can tweak the process to get the result that you wanted. If you are getting feedback, that means that you are producing some sort of result-driven activity; you are participating in result-driven activity, but the misunderstanding is that if I get feedback that looks different than what I wanted, then that is failure. That is not failure, that is simply feedback that you're either going in the right directionor you're going in the wrong direction and it's time to make changes. There's a big difference - feedback is not failure.

Jaime: I love rants - I made him do pushups before so he had extra energy.

Ryan: All you have to do is bring up failure and I get excited.

Jaime: I think that is something that's really exciting. It's like having a hypothesis and your hypothesis is not always going to be correct. I mean in science it's just not going to be correct most of the time but people freak out - "Oh my gosh, I was wrong!"

Ryan: If you put up a sales page or you try to sell a product and you don't get sales, you didn't fail, you just got some feedback from the marketplace that something needs to be adjusted.

Jaime: The problem that people have, though, is that they don't know what to adjust. They're emotionally drained, nobody wanted it, so they back away. What should they do?

Ryan: Look at the activities that the people at the top are doing successfully and then model one of those things. You don't need to get everything right. Model one thing that has produced results for the people at the top. For example, on Amazon, we decided to focus exclusively on reviews. We have the best customer service, we have the best process for getting reviews, we would absolutely be obsessed with making unhappy customers happy and as a result of that, just getting good at that one thing, we drove our sales forward on Amazon and that was just focusing on the one metric that we knew was important. Other people, even on Amazon, focus on other things - they focus on the conversion of their page or their images being the best, because all of those things factor into whether someone buys. So we just focused on one thing that we saw the people at the top doing and got really good at that because, again, you can have competitive advantage in whatever it is that you're doing and get really specific and that's what we did.

Jaime: That's awesome. That's the thing - we can really only focus on one thing at a time in general. When you get really good at that you can always add more stuff later.

Ryan: There's a term that a buddy of mine uses called "having an allspark." Allspark is a term from "Transformers". I've never seen "Transformers" - he's the nerd, I'm not a nerd.

Jaime: I should have had him on the show.

Ryan: I've never seen "Star Wars" or "Star Trek".

Jaime: What? Get out!

Ryan: This is my apartment!

Jaime: Darn it!

Ryan: The allspark is the center of influence in "Transformers". I don't know what it is but, when we talk about it, it's the centerpiece of what everything else is created and filled with life, I think is the term from "Transformers", but you need to have this anchor of what is the foundation of everything else that you're doing as an entrepreneur or as the owner of a company. So what is the foundation that everything else has spawned from? So if you're an investor, it's cash. If you have cash, then you can do all of these outshoots from the foundation, which is your cash. So doing the second thing and the third thing and the fourth thing is a lot easier when you have that foundation, when you have that allspark, where you can spawn all of this activity from and you still have this foundation. It's also a lot less scary to fail when you have your foundation in place. So, again, for us, we focus on one thing and getting really good at that one thing, because we know that when we focus on something else it would be exponentially more impactful because we had that allspark, that foundation, in place.

Jaime: That's what a lot of people need anyway to feel good about doing all of these extra things. What you see with people is that they go in 17 different directions, going "One of these is going to hit at some point!"

Ryan: It does not work like that. I used to say that I had several things in the fire and one would catch. It never happened; it doesn't work like that.

Jaime: Thank you! Everybody thinks "If I do enough, one will hit, and then I'll just focus on that one."

Ryan: It doesn't happen like that.

Jaime: Because you need the drive behind it.

Ryan: I wish it did happen like that because then I could be really entrepreneurial ADD. But it doesn't happen like that, it happens when you have one thing, and then you can have ADD. Then you can do number two and three and four. But without that foundation, you're toast.

Jaime: That's exactly what so many people who come on the show say. So many people want to be serial entrepreneurs before they even have one company that's successful - and you're like "No, no, no - we need to have one foundation." I like that you call it an allspark even though you don't know what that is. Not that I do either, so don't worry. We have to start wrapping up so I'm going to ask you the same last question that I ask everybody - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Ryan: I would say if you have a product or a service the one thing that you can look at is what is the channel where people are already spending money in your industry? So where are your customers currently hanging out and where are they actually spending dollars and how are those dollars being transacted? If you can follow that path, if you can follow that channel, then you can ask yourself the question "How can I position my product or my service strategically in this channel so that I'm not in this place where I have to go and chase business, business is automatically coming to me because I'm in the middle of a channel?" So that's one thing people can do - look at the channel where people are spending money in your industry and learn how people are positioning themselves in that channel so that you can duplicate that success.

Jaime: Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming over.

Jaime: Tell us where we can find you online.

Ryan: You can find me at FreedomFastLane.com. You can have access to my podcast and all of my secrets for free. It's on iTunes under the handle Freedom Fast Lane.

Jaime: Total marketer - "All of my secrets!" Thanks for coming on. Everybody should definitely check that out and leave a review for Ryan because he's awesome.

Ryan: And very handsome.

Jaime: I hope you enjoyed that interview with Ryan. I'm super inspired by his story about how he maybe went down the wrong path without that integrity and without really having that passion that he wanted and he could change - he stopped and was able to come back even higher than he had before. I think that's a huge story that everybody needs to hear - even if you don't feel like you're on the right path you can still change and be successful. So I was really excited to talk to Ryan about that, plus he had killer content, so I thought that was great. I'm super excited about this new thing that I have coming out in September - you can go to EventualMillionaire.com/waitlist to learn a little bit more about it. We're calling it Millionaire Hustlers and it's 90 days to kicking your butt into high gear, becoming ridiculously productive and finding more cash in your business. Who doesn't want more cash in their business? If you're excited about that, as excited as I am - I've been working behind the scenes for months and months on this - go to EventualMillionaire.com/waitlist and I'm super excited to see you there. Take care, bye!

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Abundance, Business Building, Business Growth, business startup, business strategy, integrity, marketing strategy, millionaire interview, Ryan Moran, Startup

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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