It's

crazy.

One of my lessons that I learned early on in life is like, I remember talking to one of my mentors.

He gave me a piece of advice that was basically like, Whatever you learn from somebody, try to be the person that they tell other people about.

And I thought about that.

And I was like, oh, yeah, because all my success stories, people who have listened to me and gone on, I can name them, you know, and we have a lot.

And so if you are the person that listens so intently to other people on your journey and then tells them a little thank you, like, hey, Ryan, I just read your book.

Why? It would probably be good for you to figure that out before you've taken out a home equity line of credit on your house.

Yes.

And I do it nonstop.

I mean, the idea that doing more is going to make you win is, I think, why so many entrepreneurs are miserable.

Yeah.

Because they have bought into the idea, if I just do one more, I will become better, bigger, richer, et cetera.

And in fact, it's usually what are the 10 things you need to stop doing right now that are burning up time that you can't even picture? And what are the two things that if you did them would make everything else meaningless? And if you find those, then you really win.

You don't know that that's true and you might not get to that point.

It's actually a good frame, that idea of are you in harness or are you out? Are you free in the field or are you under plow? And I think if you're an entrepreneur and you're thinking about that, it's like how much time do you actually spend under tension in that harness? And then how much time do you spend on long walks? on vacation.

Talk us through that, and are there certain business models that tend to be more resilient than others?

It's actually wild, the statistics on small business.

Like first of all, if you're not doing that well in business right now, don't feel too bad because I don't think people realize that, you know, less than one percent of business owners ever hit ten million dollars in revenue.

Less than ten percent ever hit a million.

And again, somewhere between sixty-five and ninety, depending on duration, don't make it at all.

So everybody that you see on X and everywhere who's talking about all the millions that they make, yeah, I mean, half the time they're not even talking about revenue.

They're certainly not talking about profit.

Talk us through that a little, what those trends are looking like.

For sure it's not me.

It was me, not that long ago.

Super fancy way to say, you buy private companies with other people's money like loans, etc.

When you hear people say Blackstone or KKR, these big companies, that's private equity.

That is the ultimate financial cool kids club.

Private equity, venture capital, super quote-unquote cool.

I was in that realm, but I realized for a long time, all it is is making money for these other people, a lot of middle-aged white guys.

Can you tell us what that is? Because I think this is a really important thing to think about, and we feel it here in Austin for sure.

Así que, ¿cuál es la salida a esta trampa?

Sí.

Bueno, primero creo que realmente necesitas darte cuenta de que la mayoría de las personas que te dan consejos en Internet sobre negocios eran miserables antes de comenzar su negocio, miserables mientras lo construían y probablemente todavía un poco miserables después del éxito.

Eso fue una gran realización para mí.

Todas estas personas a las que escucho decir que tienen vidas que no quieren, ¿entonces por qué las estoy escuchando sobre cómo construir un negocio? Y creo que, como generación, muchos de nosotros nos unimos por el trauma como emprendedores, diciéndonos: «Tiene que ser de esta manera, tiene que ser tan difícil».

Porque si en cambio dices: «La vida en realidad es bastante buena.

Sí, hay un par de cosas aquí y allá, pero en general está bien».

¿En serio?

So what is the, the way out of this trap?

Yeah.

Well, first I think you real- you need to realize that most people who are giving you advice on the internet about business were miserable before they started their business, miserable as they're building it, and probably still kind of miserable post success.

And so, like, that was a huge realization for me is like, oh, all these people that I'm listening to have lives that I don't want, so why am I listening to them about building a business? And I think as a generation, a lot of us like trauma bonded as entrepreneurs-

Do you think you were consciously thinking about, "Oh, I need to keep improving and growing and succeeding, um, to keep up with others that you admire or respect or whatever, friends?" Or do you feel like it was more of an unconscious thing?

It's unconscious.

I mean, I think you...

We're all mimetic desire machines, right? Like, you see the Joneses have something, you want what the Joneses have.

[chuckles] Why is that?

Well, one, people are always going to dislike you for succeeding at the thing that they were not able to succeed at.

People will hate you for having less and doing more with it.

And so if somebody has gone through something incredibly traumatizing, like buying a business and failing at it, all they see are other people that will fail too.

And I'm not sure how that is helpful at all.

Like, unless we're telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, let's, like, nobody's going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and it not working out.

You're going to learn.

Is building a personal brand now sort of an economic necessity for everyone, for every business?

Mm.

It's kind of like the universe.

I mean, um, every single animal and species on the planet wants to proliferate.

You know, it wants to grow.

And so money's gonna go where it can proliferate and grow, and I've just seen it again and again and again.

The people who are able to make a million dollars, who are able to make a billion dollars, if you took the money away from them, they would go, and they would make it again.

And the cool part is, is that you can become that type of person because they're actually not much smarter than you, the really rich people.

Right

I know you said there's not a specific niche, but one of the most common questions from our audience is which jobs are going to be safe from AI? So if you do have to give us a niche or a sector for when you're looking at starting in these businesses, which one do you think will be the safest?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, what's interesting about I would be curious your guys's take, too.

But when I first came out, I literally was like, oh, my God, this is going to take so many people's jobs and they are not prepared and they're not doing what it takes.

And this is actually really scary, even for my employees.

Now, I see a lot of my employees using AI or a lot of people using AI, and their output is so bad that it was almost better before they used AI.

And so I actually think there's going to be this barbelled world in which those who are good at prompting, who are thoughtful, who have aesthetic, who think in context, who understand what good looks like, will make so much money, it'll make other people uncomfortable.

Do you really think you can do it without sacrifice?

Why is that?

Well, one, people are always going to dislike you for succeeding at the thing that they were not able to succeed at.

People will hate you for having less and doing more with it.

And so if somebody has gone through something incredibly traumatizing like buying a business and failing at it, all they see are other people that will fail too.

And I'm not sure how that is helpful at all.

Like, unless we're telling somebody to go dive with great white sharks, in which case they might get eaten, nobody's going to die from trying to start a business or buy a business and it not working out.

You're going to learn.

But I guess discipline is never simple.

Sure.

Do I agree with that in every way? No.

But dollars do move the world.

I've seen it firsthand.

It's one of the reasons we run businesses the way that we do because my belief is if we put more small businesses in the hands of, uh, local citizens, those businesses will keep money in the local economy, they'll hire from the local economy, and they will have happier citizens.

Plus, like I don't wanna go to another Starbucks.

I wanna go to the coffee shop next to Ryan's store on Bastrop, right? I just like that local experience.

Yeah.

... "and I'm terrified of giving it over to someone that I don't trust fully, and I've been burned in the past because people have made promises when I was earlier and greener in my business career, and the first person that I hired, that was a nightmare, and then I tried to get a family member, and that was a nightmare." And what's the 80/20 rules of finding and training great staff?

Yeah.

Well, I would say, one, your first hires are almost always gonna suck, uh, because you kind of suck when you start.

So just don't feel bad for hiring bad people in the beginning.

That's totally natural, and you're probably not gonna do much about that.

Um, we have something called the hiring matrix, which is basically...

This is-- So there's three steps to finding great people, right? Or getting great people.

What would you leave them with?

Thank

you for that.

It's the only way I can remember anything.

I have the mind of a goldfish.

So that's the other thing that's good about the process is you don't need to be smart or brilliant or remember everything to run a really profitable business.

You need named frameworks and systems that you can steal from other people in order to take their 10,000 hours and apply it to you.

And so I am not, I'm not smart.

But I think it's a different conversation, especially for women and especially around family planning.

Explain that to me.

Yeah, I mean, when I say a great quarter and a burned-out owner look the same on a P&L, what I mean is, like, what is your price that you are paying for the life that you don't even want? And I think often when we start a business, everybody only measures it one way, which is how many millions are you doing? How much money are you making? How many employees do you have? Well, does any of that actually make you happy? Might you be more happy with a million dollar a year business, that could be incredible, and two employees and that's it? And maybe you'd actually be more profitable at that than scaling way up.

But I think people stopped asking themselves at some point, "Do I want more, more, more in this?" And in business, like, more complexity equals more problems almost always.

Mm.

So you will almost always have pricing issues in your business if you are an artist and you don't like to price very high.

And then the second is, we call it your, um, your P&L review, a- and I know this sometimes freaks people out, but looking at the financials of your business, and we run it through a screen to basically say, "Is your margin high enough? Are you making enough profits and revenue?" And this is just math.

This side, it's math.

This side, it's touchy-feely.

Mm.

And so I feel like the book kinda came around 'cause I needed it.

And the idea is you go, you take the Owner Score, you find what your personality is.

Once you figure that out, you pair that with what we call the 12 Ps, which basically finds, in your business or in your career, where's the one thing that's holding you back? And a lot of times, for women, it's things like you don't negotiate well enough for yourself.

In a business, that would be pricing.

In a career, that would be salary.

Um, maybe even, like, you know, you guys, if you're doing a, a movie or something, are you the one that is pushing hard, or, like, does that make you uncomfortable? You don't wanna be greedy.

Welcome to the fourth floor.

Us being Forbes or the podcast, I'm really interested in the media space, um, how you make money as a c- as a creator.

Yeah, well, the, the media side of the business I think of as our top of funnel.

So, you know, media and attention is, like, the most limited resource.

And, you know, you guys were way ahead of the curve, but I think most financial publications and most financial firms really looked down on media actually.

They thought it d- it wasn't, you know, didn't trade at good multiples.

It, it wasn't a good business model over time.

Um, and, you know, you would never imagine a, a Goldman Sachs or a KKR or even a, a Andreessen Horowitz having a media company, although now they do.

People need it, and it's really, they're really valuable.

Yeah.

But in that you do get to be your own architect.

And so, I don't know, I'm going back and forth with this real pushback to can't you be really quite successful running a business that does a couple million dollars a year, doing it your way? Maybe it's in a small town.

Maybe it's with a small team.

But you are in charge, and the CEO is on the door, and that's your name.

But you simultaneously still get to go to the kids' events, and you still get to have your activities.

And I think that is totally doable, and we don't have to have this hustle porn misery addiction to trauma bonding over being an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And now, let me say this straight, I asked for it.

I put myself out there.

That was a d- that was a me decision.

But, um, you know, if you have 15 million followers, about 1% of them are going to hate you.

And so I always just am like, "Ah, send them love." I've never gotten hate from somebody doing more than me, so I just keep reminding myself of that.

How did you get started in all of this?

Yeah.

Someone wants to start a business, what are the steps?

Well, step number one is you've gotta understand the economics of business.

We call this the 12 Ps.

They're things like understanding the profits, the pricing, the processes to run a business.

That never really gets taught in school.

You get taught how to work in big companies.

And so I think you've gotta learn the steps to do it, and then you've gotta do the hardest of things, which is take a risk.

What kinds of feedback have you been getting from all the people that have been following you?

Right.

If you don't have ownership, then AI is a threat to you and whatever task you do, AKA job you do, on a day-to-day basis.

So I actually think that the stuff that I'm talking about is more relevant today than it was three years ago.

I did not expect that.

I had no idea the speed at which AI was gonna move.

I just knew that if I looked at historical data, if you wanna be a millionaire, sixty percent of millionaires own a business.

If you wanna be worth thirty million dollars or more, eighty-eight percent of them own a business.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

And you will only program yourself to be successful by reading all the things you were probably typically not told to read in school, and by doing things that allow you to continue to grow and succeed.

You can't win in business if you're the cheapest one continuously over time, unless you're the best operator in your area.

Like, unless you're Sam Walton- Of Walmart level good, you should not be the low-cost provider.

He was a psychopath.

That's why he was so good at this, you know? The man would fly his airplane over parking lots to see which stores were full, then land in the parking lot and go yell at everybody about why nobody was there.

I mean, he was unhinged.

Yeah.

What is the brokest you have ever been and what did you learn

from that moment? I mean, let me pull out the Santa Claus list.

There are a lot.

I mean, a couple things maybe you could relate to.

I know the sound your credit card makes when it swipes and it declines.

Declines.

Like I know it intimately.

That is the Goliath.

[laughs]

... encounter, right? So after you do that, you're gonna wanna have a conversation that sounds like this.

"Okay, Mr.

Owner, you want $2 million for your business.

You think that's what it's valued at, right?" And you go, "Right." "Okay, um, let me show you.

When I took your business to the bank, based on what you showed me, the bank said they would give you about a mil," whatever the dollar amount is.

Usually, businesses are not worth what the owner thinks it is.

We're of course gonna be looking at the financials to some degree, right? So what are you looking at personally when you are trying to buy a business, and then also if we need to hire people, hire an operator, what do we need to consider in terms of the financials?

It's just a big mystery.

And now it's less of a mystery.

It's a little bit of like, you know, there's a lot of patriarchal tendencies in that area.

There's narco trafficking.

There's, you know, a pretty big human trafficking component.

And so it's kind of like probably this smorgasbord sort of reasons.

But what I realized is I was like, the difference between me and them isn't just that I was American and they're Mexican.

And you saw it, and most people don't.

[laughs]

You go get a nice job.

You work in a big corporate field.

You go to Wall Street.

That's super cool.

You work at Goldman Sachs.

You climb this ladder.

Um, anything you wanna call out specifically? I think we're talking about it here, Co, but anything they can expect from the book or anything just to give the book one minute?