Right About Now with Ryan AlfordJoin media personality and marketing expert Ryan Alford as he dives into dynamic conversations with top entrepreneurs, marketers, and influencers. "Right About Now" brings you actionable insights on business, marketing, and personal branding, helping you stay ahead in today's fast-paced digital world. Whether it's exploring how character and charisma can make millions or unveiling the strategies behind viral success, Ryan delivers a fresh perspective with every episode. Perfect for anyone looking to elevate their business game and unlock their full potential.Resources:Right About Now NewsletterJoin The NetworkFollow Us On InstagramSubscribe To Our Youtube ChannelSUMMARYIn this podcast episode, several prominent entrepreneurs share their insights on building and scaling a business. Jasmine Star, CEO of Social Curator, emphasizes the importance of hard work. Sean Whalen, founder of Lions Not Sheep, advocates for simplicity in business concepts. Jeff Dudan, CEO of Home Front Brands, discusses the challenges of obtaining trademarks, reassuring that not every good name is taken. Josh, founder and CEO of Snow, outlines initial business steps, highlighting Facebook ads and Shopify. Devan Kline, founder and CEO of Burn Bootcamp, advises investing in anticipation of growth to scale quickly.TAKEAWAYSImportance of hard work in achieving entrepreneurial successThe necessity of simplicity in business concepts and communicationChallenges and strategies for securing trademarks for business namesInitial steps for starting a business, including effective marketing toolsThe significance of having a small, dedicated team for customer support and operationsStrategies for scaling a business quickly and effectivelyThe role of creativity and persistence in branding and namingProactive investment in anticipation of growth and future demandsLessons learned from diverse entrepreneurial experiencesKey principles for navigating the complexities of starting and growing a businessIf you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding. Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is featured in this entrepreneurship masterclass episode?
Hey guys, Ryan Alford here, host of Write About Now. On today's episode, we bring together really a masterclass in entrepreneurship. We've had over 500 episodes at this stage, and we really have started to aggregate some of the best business knowledge in the industry. And, you know, you can read books, you can listen to shows, but we want to aggregate what we think is some of the best advice.
Whether you're an entrepreneur that's just started out or you're in the business for 10 plus years, these are tactics, techniques, actionable advice from some of the best. We've got five of my favorites here. Jasmine Starr says, Jeff Duden from Homefront Brands, Sean Whalen from Lions Not Sheep, Josh Snow from Snow Teeth Whitening, and Devin Klein from Burn Boot Camp.
These are some of my favorite entrepreneurs giving the best advice. That's what we do here. We take the BS out of business in this masterclass series on entrepreneurship on Right About Now.
This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. Hey. We're always getting right. And it's always about now. What makes you keep pushing forward? What got you? Something impacted you. Something made you that. Was it nature, nurture? What was it?
Perhaps a mix of both. My father is from Mexico. My mom is from Puerto Rico. My dad came over. I was like 13, 14, and then enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and earned his citizenship. So I think that growing up with that perspective as a first generation Latina, you see your dad being given the golden ticket.
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Chapter 2: What mindset and grit are essential for entrepreneurial success?
And I think that, you know, I won the genetic lottery by being born in this country. But having a father who was drilled into us like everything. We are so incredibly fortunate to live in a country where you don't have barriers to do the thing that you want. It is on the back end of people who are having the hotspot and the audacity to do something that they are unqualified to do.
And so having that growing up, but then also realizing you're owed nothing. Getting into the country, congrats. Being born into this country, congrats, you're old jack squat. Everything that you have is on the back of your willingness to do the damn work. And so what it made me gritty knowing I'm owed nothing. I don't, just because I start a business doesn't mean my business should be successful.
Just because I start a business and it's successful doesn't mean I'm gonna be the top 1%. If I go in and my, my perspective, just like Simon Sinek says that this is an infinite game. There's no such thing as winning in business. You can win your own game, but many of us don't even define what the game we're playing is.
And so all of a sudden we play a game in our own mind where we move the goalpost. And so it's just like all this year, you know, it's like, I'm going to do my 10 million. And the minute we get to 9.5, it's like, No, no, no. I see what I need. What I really meant was 11. And then we beat ourselves up at the end of the year because we didn't do the thing that we wanted to do.
What game are you actually playing? Because the minute that we define our rubric of success, because sometimes money isn't always the goal. Sometimes the goal is, do I have more time to do the things I want to do with the people I want to do it?
with it's like what is the point of having an 11 million dollar a year if on the back of it you missed the people and the things that were the most important to you you didn't win you lost you just didn't know what game you were playing so for us to actually have a conversation of like what makes you gritty well first and foremost let's talk about what we're owed nothing let's talk about how we win setting some goals and then working like hell to get them but not at the cost of compromising the thing that's the most important to you so what makes me gritty the fact that i have simply chosen
This is the game I want to play. And every time I get punched in the gut, because we always do, that's the sport. We're literally playing emotional rugby all day, every day. We play rugby in our sleep. I don't know about you. I play rugby in my sleep. I wake up and I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. This is the game we're voluntarily playing. We signed up for it.
We can't complain about the thing that we want to do to get us to where we want to go. So I just think what a privilege. What a privilege that I get to wake up, go on a walk in Newport Beach, have breakfast with my daughter, have a conversation with somebody I find intellectually stimulating where we get to help and empower other people.
And then I get to go in and do coaching on the inside of Social Curator. And then I get to create content. I get to do podcasts. What an honor and what a luxury. So if I want both sides of it, the lifestyle, the luxury, I better be able to wake up after my teeth have been knocked out and say, okay, this is the game I'm playing. I've chosen this. What an honor and what a privilege.
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Chapter 3: Why do entrepreneurs struggle with comparison and entitlement?
It's like, you know, how many times are you see this? You have people come to you and they go this or that or tactic or these things aren't working. And you just you don't even have to get under the hood. You like you like lifted up one inch and there's like oil spilled everywhere. And it's like, come on, man. You know, are you serious?
It's like, but you have to play your own game, but you've got to make it. You got to make it tangible. You have to set. Oh, it's not working. OK, well, what's not working? You know, like you got to have seven things that ladder up to one thing, you know, like but and you got to measure the seven things.
But I don't know what I still comes back to the the reflection of what you get to play your own game. And. learn and absorb from others, but you just can't get into the comparison game at all time. It's just, it just is a road to nowhere.
You know, I often discuss that the thing, the sneaky thing that stops most entrepreneurs from getting their business in front of others is comparison. And once we start understanding comparison, so oftentimes whenever I give a presentation or whenever I do a coaching session or a consulting session, I am literally starting there.
Because if I tell you this is on the horizon, when it slaps you across the face, it's not so much a shock. So anybody who's listening right now, let me predict your future. The thing that will stop you from doing the thing that you know you have been called to do is not lack of money, resources, or education. It is simply the fact of comparison.
But let's break down comparison because the way I see it is it takes on three manifestations. It takes on a mental manifestation. I am not. I am not that person. I am not Ryan. Therefore, I can't get that success. I am too old, too young, too fat, too skinny, too black, too white, too old, too young. will say I'm to this, therefore I can't do that. So that's an easy way out.
The second one is emotional. And this one's very, very hard to identify because most of the time people don't wake up and say, I'm not worthy. They don't say I'm not worthy, but it takes on an uglier form. It will say, I'm just not sure I'm capable of that big dream. I don't think that that's really gonna happen.
So we low key keep a subversive thought in our mind that's actually stopping us from doing that thing. And then the third one is going to be visual, right? I'm not on the Amalfi Coast this summer. I don't have a Ferrari. I'm not at that resort. I don't have that perfect house with those perfect kids in that perfect kitchen to do the perfect reel that I need.
And so we have these visual, intellectual, emotional moments things that stop us. But if we were to turn it on its side and simply say, you might be too old and you might be too white and you might be, but there is somebody out there who is just as white and just as old who needs to hear it your way. And in fact, even if you were to say that person does it their own way, guess what?
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Chapter 4: How does Sean Whalen’s background influence his communication style?
I mean, that's talking. I mean, when you, when you really give a shit about people, like when you really care, like, I think it's, it's something that, I mean, we're not, we're, we're just so busy trying to get, believe me, hear me, this is me. And it's like, I really, it sounds funny, but if it can't be explained on a whiteboard or like with crayons, it's too complicated.
We should not have a tax policy in America that can't be explained on a fucking whiteboard, right? We should not have foreign policies that take 30,000 page freaking manuals to fucking explain, right? No one's interested in that, really. And so we tie this into the marketing and the business and the whole thing. Like copy is really important. You know what I mean? What are you telling me?
Everybody knows they're being sold something. So we've already got that out of the way, but what are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate with me? Yay, yay, nay, nay. If the answer is a simple no, then just fucking say no, right? But I love being able to look at complex things and I break it down in my brain to just like coloring book kind of conversations.
Like, yeah, this is what this really is. And it's just more, to me, it's more fun that way. I have more connection to stuff that way. You know what I mean? Well, absolutely. And so let's talk about lions, not sheep.com.
I mean, You know, we work, you know, we're at a digital agency here and we work a lot of brands and they come to us and they have great products, but they have no story. Right. And yeah, I will take a company that has a purpose and a story all day because that's, it's organic. You know, again, it just becomes about blocking and tackling.
It's real hard to figure out the Hail Mary, you know, the message, you know, the blocking and tackling you can do. But let's get to some of that blocking and tackling. What have been some of those mechanics of, Because I've heard you talk about it.
You started the company, you were selling t-shirts, you had a message, you had a plan, but something poured gas on the fire for the tactics and some of the ways with which you've seen growth.
Can you talk about some of that? Yeah, for sure. First of all... there's two philosophies in my opinion, like you, anybody who's a really, really, really good ad guy or copy guy or whatever. I mean, you can take any product and figure out a way to sell it. Right. And there's a lot of people that do that. They take, you know, products from China. They're really good.
They figured out the game, the algorithms, they can do that. And then there's people that, that, have passion behind something. They live it, they breathe it, they sleep in it. It's, it's, it's being to them because their kid has cancer and they want this product out there and they want this thing or that thing. And there's a story and a connection behind it.
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Chapter 5: What makes Lions Not Sheep a unique and successful brand?
So they came to us and said, we've got two weeks to do this. We've got seven or eight people that we're talking to. We'd have to fly out from California tomorrow, shoot a sizzle reel, put it together, pitch it to NBC. And they would, or was it CBS? I think it was CBS. Pitch it to the network. Yeah. Pitch it to CBS.
and they would have to decide so we did that and really quick it came back that they were interested in having us on so then we went through the reams and reams and reams of paperwork and it was we went out on the show I mean we went out on the road maybe like a month later and it was a surreal experience for those people that haven't been behind the scenes in a production like that
It was really cool. I know I signed a bunch of confidentiality stuff and I really don't want to do anything to, you know, I don't want to say anything that makes it harder for them to do the show. But it just it seems to me, Ryan, like every year the show is canceled.
Yeah.
And then somehow it comes back for another. So but I mean, to pull this, it's such a well-known show. But I will tell you the the way that this is done, there is it is it is so it is done so well and so over the top. That you would not think, like, people do, like, is this undercover boss? And then as this is going on, they're like, no, it's not. It's clearly not. But it really is.
So, yeah, it was great. We ended up being on the road. We had a couple of little hiccups with a couple of things that were going on politically where we shot some stuff in North Carolina and then there. They're like, oh, well, we don't want to shoot in North Dakota. We had to reshoot stuff. So I had to fly my family. We did all the family stuff, right? We went, we did the office stuff.
We did the B-roll at the office. And then we went to the house and, you know, I'm cooking hot dogs on the grill. Dogs are swimming in the pool and all that. And they're like, we can't use any of that because there was some political thing going on. So, and it was a, you know, one of those things. And so then they, You know, we go out on the road for a week. We film two or three segments.
We fly my family to this wonderful resort somewhere in Georgia and we reshoot all of the family stuff. And then we go on the road. So I was on the road for a total of like 16 days. And it was a great experience. And I will tell you that we had five, the producer said we had five episodes that we had to cut one that many shows would have killed to have.
I mean, our franchisees were absolutely amazing. They lived the values of our company. They were out there trying to do the best thing for the customer. They were highly empathetic. I mean, I could have picked at a few things here and there, but at the end of the day, we ended up with four great segments. I got busted twice. They showed one of them.
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Chapter 6: What production challenges did Lions Not Sheep face during rapid growth?
And now I had built and sold many companies beforehand. I was independently wealthy. I could have poured a lot more money into the business, but I was still ruminating on Is this something that has legs? Is this something that I think it is? Like, am I crazy? And once I started to see that, then it became hiring more products, different versions of the products, more channels to acquire customers.
Now we're in CVS, Walgreens, Best Buy, Neiman Marcus, Saks, Macy's. So now we're in, you know, about a dozen premier top retail partners today. But in the very beginning, it's Facebook ads, Shopify, one system, one person or two to help on customer support and shipping it out. And I shipped it from my spare bedroom of the house because the inventory, I didn't want to get an office yet.
I wasn't sure, right? And I was investing at the time. I had just sold a couple of companies. So I said, I want to see kind of if this could be my next thing, you know? And sure enough, it certainly did.
is uh, you know, as you expanded past Facebook and started to get the broader, I mean, it's Facebook has people, I don't think realize how many billion people are on Facebook and how broad, you know, the awareness is, but what was the, the percentage of like us versus non us? And was it, we talking pretty much 95, nine, I mean, majorly us based.
And what were the channels that kind of, what were the awareness channels that they kind of flowed after Facebook other than just distribution itself?
yeah so it was uh you know uh google youtube sold the whole google suite the whole meta suite uh amazon uh advertising that whole suite um actually retail media networks so um uh also spotify uh audio right so there's every so retail media is If we're in Best Buy, we want to buy web banner ads and we want to be the sponsored on Best Buy for anything teeth related.
And so we're spending inside of the trade marketing to push those things. But they drive awareness top of funnel as well on those platforms.
and then we're doing everything from youtube we're doing a relaunch of tick tock we've been hiring we still are hiring like crazy for tick tock on the snow side so tick tock is top of funnel we're really excited about relaunching that instagram facebook are still very heavy on the front end we do a lot of affiliate marketing as well um i actually acquired the affiliate marketing.com domain name about a year ago to build more uh reach in that space because it's uh
It's a big portion across all of our brand, all the brands in my portfolio and all the brands that I've invested in affiliate marketing is a very profitable channel across the board. So affiliate marketing is another area because a lot of these bloggers, vloggers, Amazon editorial affiliates, they're putting us in front of an audience for the very first time listicles, things like that.
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Chapter 7: Why is trademarking important for franchising a business?
It's cheaper. I'm just going to do it on Amazon. So you got to now play in that direction. Five, 10 years ago, you could get away without having to lean into it. Although I wish I could go back five and 10 years and I would have built an army of, of, of, of team members and partners on our Amazon channel. And we would have been totally dominating that channel. So I love it.
You do get access to email your customers. Now they've got some new things. There's all kinds of stuff, but it's the only platform that's driven by sales. So you can become the number one in your category, even above the big companies. by sales volume. So you can drive, you direct your sales.
Like if Snow directed all of our sales to Amazon today, which is maybe 15 to 20% of our US digital revenue. So let's say we put all of our US digital revenue into Amazon.
we would be the number one in every single category above all of the incumbent brands just because of velocity but we would give up 15 at least margin based off of versus our own you give up some data but I got to tell you there are days where I go that's not the worst idea but you know there's a better way to go about it you know build up the Amazon presidents and build up the traffic and build up the list so a long story short anyone listening
I would like triple down and look up a company called Hero Cosmetics. Look up a company called Zesty Paws by one of my good friends. And they're a half a billion dollar pet supplement brand. 100% of their sales pretty much were from Amazon. Look up Hero Cosmetics. They have a miracle patch for acne.
20 bucks, they sold for 630 million, I think the beginning of this year in January, 40 million in profit just through Amazon. It was an Amazon driven business. So these Amazon businesses are getting very strong multiples. They're raising money. They're TikTok friendly. So I would say lean into Amazon harder than you ever have. and really figure out how to dominate that platform in your category.
Because it's the only place you can see sales as well. You can literally see an estimate of what everyone's selling. You can go look at Snow's stuff and be like, oh, they're selling an estimate of this much from this SKU. It's a great platform to build on.
You take pitching specifically, and there's a lot of recovery nuances, a lot of longevity nuances, a lot of, we really care about that stuff, right? Because we couldn't be We couldn't have our product be our differentiator if we weren't focused on longevity, right? We tell people like, this is going to be long, hard, and difficult. And it's going to take consistency and discipline and dedication.
You're not going to do it in 30, 60, 90 days. You know, likely you're not going to like, you know, wake up one day and like, Be strong as an ox. It's going to take five years. And are you in for this ride? Do you believe that you're worth it?
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Chapter 8: What was Jeff Dudan’s experience on Undercover Boss?
That is right. That's it in a nutshell. My answer was real long-winded.
I simplify for my... I've been in marketing jobs. I like acronyms and simplicity. Yeah, but it's great. I mean... But that sounds like the building blocks of a long-term program and not, like you said, a gimmick. Because everybody gets that fire when they're ready to, okay, I need to lose some weight. I've got an event coming up, whatever.
they get fire in their belly, but then it dies if you don't have the building blocks of something broader. You need the community to kind of keep you in it. You need the recovery because if you're chilling yourself and not recovering at all, then they get down and out, like you said. So,
I can see and all I know is the periphery, you know, I've heard, I've had people many times, you do burn, whatever, whatever. So I'm going to make a promise to you that I'll go, I'm going to go hit burn up here at Greenville eventually. But what's it been like growing the business, man? I mean, going, I mean, Just that kind of scale is incredible.
What's that roller coaster been like? Definitely one, right? In 2015, when we announced that we were going to franchise in all 50 states, We thought hitting the home run might be awarding 10 units in our first year and really getting those stood up. And we were always concerned with unit economics. I'll talk about that in a minute. But I had no idea that we would do 200 in the first 18 months.
And Fran did this article out of Franchise Times Magazine. It was one of our first... earned media pieces that was talking about business that I was super proud of. And it said that we're in the 99% of all growth from all franchises of any franchise that entered the market since 2010. And this was like 18 months in. And I'm like, Okay, well, we better not screw this up then.
So how do we get all of these gyms open? We got to focus on, we call it ULEs, unit level economics. You had a guest on, Jeff Duden, who's from this area. He taught me this, actually. He's been a good friend and mentor of mine throughout the years. He taught me validation and franchising. And validation really in any business, it's not a franchise particular concept.
but it's the stakeholders of your business being happy. It's your debt promoter score. How likely are they to recommend this business or doing business with you to somebody else? And number one, number one thing is, number one box to check, if you will, is are they making money? And what type of money are they making?
So I'm always looking for a, this might be something people want to write down because I'll give you like a strategy. What I'm looking for in any business I grow is an investment. Let's say the investment is at $500,000. I need to make a million dollars in year one. in order for that investment to be considered an A-plus investment for me.
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