- Here.
I'm going to put this Cleveland
Indians sticky note.
I'm going to just hang it on there.
Is that the first note we used?
- Yeah.
We got that on camera!
- Whaat!?
(laughter)
What's up, Fast Laners?
I'm Ryan Daniel Moran.
Today we'll talk about
inequality and human rights,
we'll talk about regret
and how to move past it,
we'll look at some
entrepreneurial failures,
and we'll look at a six-figure business
about picking up dog poop?
Fancy catch phrase.
(upbeat music)
So, how do we not talk about the protests
and the marches that are
happening around the country
and around the world?
Now, this has been all over the news.
We've been talking around water coolers
and this has been the talk,
the talk of the town, right?
How do we not talk about this?
Overall, I think that peaceful protest
is one of our responsibilities
in protecting a free society.
When we see the government acting in ways
that we don't approve of, it is our right
and our responsibility to say something,
to do something, and to organize.
So, hats off to those of
you who were at protests
and marches and did so peacefully.
That is part of the beauty
of the world that we live in.
There is a danger though,
that I fear we are starting
to move the conversation
in a way that encourages
the government to serve as a bully pulpit.
For example, one of the
rights or one of the problems
that has been brought up
in light of recent events
would be something like income
inequality among genders.
There is a push for both genders
to be guaranteed equal pay.
So, we all agree that
discrimination is a bad thing
and that we should avoid it, right?
We all think that we want
people to be treated fairly
and have equal protection under the law.
That's what social justice is about.
We should all strive for that.
But there is a danger in
expecting the government
to go in and by force
mandate people to comply
with something that you
might think is a good idea.
For example, today more
women are in college
and getting college degrees than men.
Women's incomes are increasing
at a faster rate than men's.
As a result of us not being
a manufacturing economy
anymore, women are having
more executive experience
and are having more upward mobility.
As a capitalist, as an entrepreneur,
I think it's a good idea
to hire lots of women
'cause they're better than
us at a lot of things.
So, when we look at that data and we see
that it's really only in the past 30 years
that we have moved more
towards an intellectual economy
rather than a manufacturing economy,
and we see women's wages
going up at a faster rate
and more education, there is no reason
for the government to come in and by force
try to mandate equality among pay.
That is happening already.
It's happening in the marketplace.
It is because of freedom
in entrepreneurship
and capitalism that that is happening.
My fear is that the government coming in
and acting as a bully pulpit and saying,
"This is the way it has to be,"
will actually cause more
division and discrimination
than if they stayed out
of it in the first place.
For example, to keep
the argument consistent,
if the government comes in and says,
"You have to have equal pay," well,
from a business owner's perspective,
that business owner could say,
"I want to hire this person but
the skillset isn't there yet
"so I'm just not going to hire them at all,"
rather than coming up with
a different arrangement
with that individual.
That hurts the people that were trying
to help in the first place.
So many legislations, many regulations,
are made with good intent
but they hurt those
that they are expected to help.
Furthermore, it causes division,
because when you isolate
rights as women's rights
or immigrant rights or gay rights,
and you call out a people group,
that causes resentment among those
who are not in that group,
or those who just have
a different opinion.
Look, it is our job to be
able to move the conversation
in the direction that you feel is best,
not go to the government and expect them
to serve as a bully pulpit
for legislating morality.
That's not the best way
that we come together.
We come together through peaceful protest.
We come together through
healthy conversation.
We don't do it by asking
politicians who are out of touch
to try and make our opinion
the law of the land.
The best thing that we
can do to drive equality
is to increase the amount
of freedom that we enjoy.
When it comes to financial freedom,
I believe the best way to do that
is to start a business
and invest the profits
and you can do that whether
you are gay, straight,
male, female, immigrant,
non-immigrant, and everything else.
So, let's look at some questions
that'll help you do exactly that.
(upbeat music)
- [Announcer] YouTube
commenter pinchnsqueal asks,
"Would you please talk
about your failures?"
- In this world of social media,
where everybody is just
putting up what's great
in their lives, I actually
really appreciated this question.
This came as a comment in YouTube
where someone was saying, "You
have all of these successes.
"What about the failures?"
Oh boy, I've got quite a few of them.
Look, I actually say that in my life,
if I was a baseball
player, my batting average
as an entrepreneur wouldn't look so good.
I probably have a batting
average of about 250,
which means that about 25%
of the entrepreneurial ideas
really bear fruit, but the ones
that do, do amazingly well.
I don't talk about the things
that we're experimenting with
that don't work so well.
Maybe I should.
Maybe it would just humanize
the entrepreneurial experience
a little bit more.
I think that the most failures
that come up regularly is,
as an entrepreneur I sometimes
have workaholic tendencies,
so as the result of
working 12, 16 hour days,
grinding my way to success,
I think the biggest failure
that comes up for me right
now in the totality of my life
is the fact that I have a
really hard time disconnecting
and I have to force
myself not to check email,
not to check Facebook, not to check Slack,
so that I can actually decompress,
because I will fill in
the time void with work,
and what that ends up doing is,
I see all the problems and
then I need to fix them all,
and then I get exhausted,
and then there's no more creativity.
But I have learned in
the last couple of years
that the more structure
that I can give myself
to actually free up time,
that recharges the batteries
and allows me to be
creative and productive.
But I have projects that
have been failures too.
I've never talked about this publicly,
but the cat scratchers that are so famous
in my most watched video
was run by Esther's mom
and she decided she wanted
to be a full-time mom
and didn't want to build
that into a big brand,
and so we shut that down.
So, that wasn't some big success.
It served a little purpose,
but it wasn't so much
of a success that we shut it down,
and we could have kept beating
our head against the wall
trying to build a business or a brand
that neither one of us
cared about that much,
but we chose not to, and so
we let the Meow Mommy go.
I have also been very public
that I have invested in
and started tech companies.
They didn't go so well.
That's not my skillset.
I don't need it to be my skillset.
I had a business called My Timeline,
which was basically a
way to archive your life.
We've talked about that
here on the show in the past
and like a week after
we went live with that,
Facebook came out with
Timeline and just crushed
that little business, and I
had like 50 grand in that.
That was lost.
I've had several investments,
six-figure investments,
like I doled out cash, and the
business didn't go anywhere,
and there went my six-figure investment.
I own a restaurant in Avon,
Ohio, called Fresh Planet,
that when compared to a lot
of my internet business,
the numbers on that pale.
They don't look nearly as good
as if I had just bought
a cash-flowing website
or bought an e-commerce business
or put it into real estate.
That basically keeps the lights on,
has a little bit left over,
and serves as a tax write-off
at the end of the year.
I love going there when I'm in Ohio,
but that wasn't a
blistering success either.
One thing that I have learned
in the midst of failure,
two things, failure is
like the perfect time
to reflect upon what's
working and what's not working
and what you would do differently,
and I find that on the
other side of failure
usually comes your best successes,
because you learned a
very important principle
of being more intentional
in the next opportunity
that comes up.
And specifically what I have learned
from a lot of, really investment failures,
is never to deviate from
what your best skillset
or what your greatest interests are.
For example, I always
thought I wanted to be
a big-time real estate investor.
I'm probably never going to be the guy
that buys thousand-unit
apartment buildings.
Let's leave that for the experts
and I might invest in you
if you come to me with a stellar deal.
Where I'm really strong
is internet companies,
physical product brands.
Double down where you are strong.
That's where you will have the
greatest return on your time,
the greatest return on your investment,
and also position you
in the best chance for
(cough) success.
I can't even say success.
It chokes me up.
So, I bring that up to say
that I have always failed
when I've tried to do something
that I am not good at doing.
That's what I have learned from failure
and I've been able to mitigate that
by learning what I'm really
good at and focusing there.
Also, it's important for us to examine,
what exactly is failure?
We all have this loose
idea of what success is,
but reach into your pocket
and show me success.
Heck, reach into your
pocket and show me freedom.
There is no universal definition
of what these things are.
It's a rule in your brain.
If I do X, Y, and Z, I am a success.
If I do X, Y, Z, I am a failure.
But we're mostly unconscious
about what these rules are.
In reality...
Like, failure in a business would be like
we're out on the streets and can't eat.
We live in modern day society, which means
it's actually really
hard to fail, because A,
you got closer to your goal,
or B, you learned something,
which makes it easier for
you to do it next time.
That is the reality of things,
so let's be gentle in
how we judge our results.
Success, like is it
success if we're closer
to the ultimate goal?
By the way, if you hit your goal
you feel exactly the
same once you get there.
So, let's celebrate progress
rather than perfection.
What is failure?
Is it that we don't feel any different,
like we still haven't made it?
'Cause if that's the case,
we could have all the success
in the world and still
feel like a failure.
So, if we have a loose idea,
or actually a really defined idea,
of what success looks like
and what failure looks like,
we can more properly adjust and also judge
our own goals and our progress.
But all we can hope
for is progress in life
as measured from where we came from.
When we get to our
goals, it's almost never
that we feel any differently
than how we were before.
Achieving the goal and
not having fulfillment,
that's the ultimate failure, because then
we're just kicking fulfillment
further and further
down the road, and we can be successful,
but inside feel like a failure.
So what is failure?
It's hard to fail if you look at it
as getting closer to what you want
or learning something, which, once again,
gets you closer to where you want to be.
- [Announcer] Karl Knight
asks, "Do you have any regrets,
"and if so, how do you deal with them?"
- Okay, I'm a nerd and I watch Survivor.
I've never missed an episode
of Survivor in my entire life.
32 seasons of Survivor, I think,
and I have never missed an episode, ever,
and I'm always shocked
when people are voted off
and they say in their
final words, "No regrets."
Who in the world does not have regrets?
Like, if you fail at something,
of course you have regrets.
The idea of like getting
to the end of your life
with no regrets, that
doesn't make sense to me,
because I have regrets, and I
can't do anything about them.
Like, I can't go back
in time and fix them.
So yes, of course I have regrets.
I have regrets around
where I went to school
and what I started off studying.
I went to college to be a pastor.
I am clearly not a pastor.
This would be a very different
show if I was a pastor.
That would be interesting.
There we go, preview
of an upcoming episode.
Anyway, I have regrets
around people I dated.
I have regrets around
business decisions I made.
I have regrets around
businesses that I started.
I have regrets around things I didn't do
that I'm only now getting to.
Yes, who in the world
does not have regrets?
People who have really low standards,
that's who doesn't have regrets.
The great question you
asked as a followup was,
"What do you do about them?"
And like most things, I think Dan Sullivan
probably has the most
insightful way to view this,
and he simply says, "If
you can look at your life
"as though everything up unto this point
"has been research and
development, R&D, that frees you up
"to make the best
decisions moving forward."
Everything up unto this point has simply
led you to where you are,
and that is when all decision is made,
in the now, based on
your previous experience.
Look, you did not get to
choose who your parents were.
You did not get to choose
where you were born.
You did not get to choose
your natural health.
You have a set of cards
that you have been dealt.
In the same way, your past
experiences, your regrets,
your successes, all of that are cards
that you currently have.
Play the best hand that you have.
If everything up unto this point
has been research and
development, you are free
to make the best with the
cards that you've got.
That is the same across
the board among all people.
We all are operating
with a set of experiences
and the opportunities
that are in front of us.
That, A, is a super freeing thought,
and A, it eliminates all judgment.
I love the quote from the
Great Gatsby that says,
"The minute that you
want to judge someone,
"just remember that they
didn't have the same set
"of opportunities as you did."
Look, we would not berate someone else
for the regrets in their past,
so let's treat ourselves in the same way
that we would expect to treat others.
(upbeat music)
This is the part of the show where we look
at one of our students' businesses
and examine where they
could be making more money
and where their best opportunities are.
Today we're looking at Tuff Mutt.
This is a submission from The Tribe
and Tuff Mutt sells products for pets.
Their website is tuffmutt.net
and they have most of their
sales coming from Amazon.com.
Owner's name is Nathan Colba.
Hey Nathan, what's goin' on, man?
And they're also on
Walmart.com and Jet.com.
So, a couple things.
Nathan, your branding is awesome.
Love the logo.
Your website is spot on.
You've done a great job.
I love the header at the
top that tells a little bit
about the story of Chester.
I love that, can I say
humanizing, the doganizing
(groaning)
approach to that?
You see what I did there?
Anyway, I'm not a funny person.
So I think your branding has been great.
I think the overall personality
of the brand is great.
Your reviews are really solid.
Now Tuff Mutt right now is doing
between $40,000 and
$50,000 a month in sales,
which is a great start.
The question is, we're
kind of at this point
where we've hit a moderate
amount of success.
What do we need to do now?
So, great.
You've got to this point
where you're profitable,
you're selling a good amount of products.
I am going to touch on what
you said in your submission
about your audience.
Your audience is less than 2,000 people.
On your Facebook page, you're looking at
only about 114 likes.
So, what do we do about this?
Two things.
One, we have figured out a
process to take a product
and to get it profitable, selling quickly,
and to have a lot of solid reviews.
We need to double down on that process.
Since you're not at the
million-dollar mark,
you need to be at about
81 some thousand dollars
to be at that million-dollar mark.
Double down on what's
got you to this point.
That means releasing as many products
as you can comfortably handle.
Two more will probably
give you the infusion
that you need to be able to get at or near
that million-dollar mark.
Everything changes when you're
at that million-dollar mark.
You're open to more
investment opportunities.
You have more customers.
You're taken more seriously as a brand.
You have more profit margins,
so you can do more to advertise.
So we need to sprint to
that $80,000 a month.
You're going to get there by releasing
probably two more products.
The second thing that we
can do to both accelerate
that process, and to set us up
for larger and wider success,
is to start building that audience
specifically on Facebook
or an email list or both.
You are in a highly visual,
highly emotional industry,
and that's pets.
We all love ours, some of us
a little bit too obsessively.
What that means is, we can very easily
get people talking and
communicating around our brand
by highlighting people's pets,
showing the products in use,
having a contest with our customers
to send pictures of them
actually using the product
and then sharing that on Instagram,
sharing that on Facebook.
That's viral gold.
People love that stuff.
They love to be participating
in that process.
So start engaging an audience.
Your cost per audience
member will be super low
because you can target people
who own Golden Retrievers,
who own every type of
dog, or just dog lovers.
I would go more specific,
just to keep the costs down.
But that amount of targeting is possible,
and the clicks are really cheap,
so you can get a bunch of
really high quality traffic
that is exactly for your market,
and we can get them rallying
around a conversation
doing contests and showing
the products being used.
This will get people
talking about your brand
and give you an audience to
launch further products to,
for you to do discounts and
giveaways to, and to also
just increase the overall
interest in your brand.
If you do that you'll solidify yourself
against Amazon changes,
you'll give yourself a
pool of potential buyers
to buy the next product, and you will have
more repeat customers and engaged people
who find out about your products,
which will get you closer
and closer to that 80K mark
and that million-dollar business.
Hey, we're in uncertain times right now,
and plenty of people feel uneasy or unsure
about what the future holds
and what direction we're going
as a global community, and what this means
for entrepreneurship and
also in our personal lives.
Look, we're all in this together.
We're all building the plane as it flies.
Rather than argue about things
that don't really matter
on Facebook, let's take a
moment to listen to one another,
to be supportive of one another,
and ultimately to realize that
we all want the same things.
We all want people to be
healthy, wealthy, safe,
and as a result, we're
really not all that different
at the end of the day.
And if we approach debates
or healthy conversations
with that as the context,
maybe, just maybe,
we can have legitimate conversations
about how to best get there.
It's my belief that more freedom
is almost always the answer,
that giving individuals
more choice and more opportunity
is always a good idea
and always a faster, more
efficient, and better way
to move toward the world that
we all want to have and enjoy.
That is why I believe that
entrepreneurship matters,
why capitalism matters,
and why it's the best shot
at building the world that we want.
Thank you for watching
and supporting the show.
We'll see you guys in the next episode.
