Insuring Your Escape Velocity - w/ Ryan Hanley | Ep. 118

In this juggernaut of an episode, David and Gary speak with Ryan Hanley, a 2X Founder and current CEO of Finding Peak. They discuss every tip in the book to make your business a success and also how to faceplant in utter failure. This can only be described as a wild ride of heart, enthusiasm and lessons learned- the hard way.

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

Ryan: 0:00

It is every little boy's dream to grow up and sell insurance for a living. Absolutely. We're living it right now right now. But I've always been, I always wanted to do

Gary: 0:09

rock stars of the

Ryan: 0:12

rock stars of the business world insurance agents.

David: 0:16

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Business Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter. And I'm joined per usual by Gary Voight. Today, when I look at you, Gary, you look like a turtle who woke up from a nap. You got your beanie and your shirt Match Color. So it's just like there's this little turtle phase coming out to say hi. Nice. Yeah, just had

Ryan: 0:38

to worry about it. He's got better zones gone. He does.

David: 0:41

More importantly, we are joined by Ryan Hanley, who is the founder and CEO of finding peak. Welcome to the show.

Ryan: 0:49

It's my pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me. Sure.

David: 0:53

So it is early in the year, how is how's 2024 looking for you.

Ryan: 0:58

Tremendous as we were discussing before we went live i early exited a company that I sold back in 2020 to about a month and a half ago. And I knew that was coming that was something that we had talked about. And for a whole bunch of reasons it made sense to go early. They're owned by P company and economics. And if you've ever done business with companies owned by P company, sometimes timing matters. So we had a really mutual positively mutual agreed upon early exit, which is great. And my business for the last 18 years has been the insurance industry. So what finding peak is, is taking the lessons that I've learned over those 18 years, and now we're helping specifically with inbound growth and sales and marketing strategy around for independent insurance agency. So that's that's what we do.

David: 1:47

So what does Okay, well, I have I have questions already. So anyway, you exited. Now, for those who don't know, that means you sold your company. Yep. And you sold it to a PE, which is private equity. Right? Does that sound correct? Yes. And so what led you to sell it? Yep. Meaning Was it a good time in the market? Or was it just I could use some money or I want to do something else? All the above? What was that make that decision?

Ryan: 2:19

Um, if you will bear with me and afford me maybe just a few minutes of context, I will answer that question. Because I wish it was more straightforward than it was. But I do think that it's relevant to especially a lot of entrepreneurs who maybe haven't sold a company yet. My like I said, my industry is the insurance industry. It is every little boy's dream to grow up and sell insurance for a living. Absolutely. I'm living it right now. But I've always been I always wanted to do

Gary: 2:50

rock stars of the

Ryan: 2:52

rock, the rock stars of the business world insurance agents. That's right. The truth is, it was essentially the dowry for my ex wives hand in marriage. Back when we were in our early 20s. I asked her father, as you know, I'm fairly traditional guy, I asked her father, you know, for his permission and blessing. And he said yes. And about a month later, he pulled me out of a Christmas party at their family home pulled me into his this is like, this is literally like out of a mafia movies got one of those offices that every one of these like McMansions have that is just looks highly uncomfortable. And it's got the wood panels. But you could never, it doesn't look like anywhere you'd actually want to do business. So So we're sitting in that room in a library? Yes, yeah. He's sitting there, across from me, you know, his son, my brother, future brother in law is kind of over his shoulder. He works at the agency too. And they kind of made me this offer I can't refuse. That's how I get in the business. So I do that for eight years, a year and a half in I realized I am absolutely positively terrible at selling insurance, the traditional way, just terrible. Just failing across the board. Cold calling. I'm putting 50,000 miles on a car driving all over. I'm from the greater Albany, New York area. So I know, you know, every back country strip mall, and I'm dropping these been all this stuff. I just hate it. I hate every second of it. But this is what the family does. So this is what I'm trying to do. Okay. So he calls me and my father in law calls me in a year and a half and and essentially fires me and I do what any self respecting young man would do it at times. I literally got down on my knees and I was like, for the love of God, please do not make me go home and tell your daughter that I just got fired by you like please. And so he gives me he says okay, I'll give you six more months, but you got to turn things around. I knew something had to change. This is right around when the internet went from being like potentially a fad to like becoming a thing. So like very early days or Twitter very early days of LinkedIn. Blogging is a thing and becoming more ubiquitous and And I found people in other industries that were doing something that today is commonplace, which is answering customer questions and creating blog posts about that. And I was like, Okay, I'm two years into this business. I don't know, I don't know anything about it. How do my customers know anything about it? Right? Like, I've licensed and passed all these tests. So I just started answering the quite like, I'd go sell a home and auto policy. And I started writing a blog post about the questions they would ask me. And, as to again, today, these things are like dogs. That's what you do. Back then. This was like blasphemy. And especially in my industry. So secrets. Yeah, yeah, true. You know, I came up with this phrase back in the day, you know, we're no longer you know, insurance agents are no longer the gatekeepers to insurance information, right? We have to tell the stories, etc. Okay. So I find digital marketing, and it changes the course of my career, I now become an agent who also uses digital, and I've done a bunch of speaking gigs, etc. Eight years, and my brother in law comes to me and says, says, well, while you're doing good job Now, granted, at the time, I'm, in my mind, I am killing the game 100 leads a month on$100 budget, you know, I'm like, you know, in this tiny, little 13 person independent agency, I'm writing business like crazy and like, they hate it, hate it, because I'm not hunting and killing and dragging it back all of that businesses worthless in their mind, like to them, every bit of that business is worthless, and throw like, those are terrible customers, or like, I don't know, doesn't matter. So they basically say to me, your name will never be on the box, you have to be okay with that. And that was at 32 or 33. However old years old, that was at the time, I was not okay with that. So I put in my, I put in my notice, and became the Chief Marketing Officer of a national technology company, I did that for four years, and got to learn the industry on a national scale. left there went to another technology company, I got to see what the other side looked like. So I've always worked for independent agencies. So the family owned, locally owned, etc, are guys that you drive by men and women, you drive by their agencies, 20 times a day, they often have travelers and progressive in the window, and they look like they were built in 1950, and never been updated. That's the people that I work with, Okay, I've worked for the people coming at them. I've worked for supporting agencies. And then and been fired by all these guys, by the way. And finally, I decided in 2018, that maybe I wasn't meant for the insurance industry, I had been fired, essentially, because that's where they were pushing me out of my family, families agency, ex felons agency, I got fired by this company trusted choice.com that I went to, as a chief marketing officer got fired by the next company that I worked for. And I said, maybe it's insurance. And I went and worked for a fitness franchise here locally. And, and in nine months, I applied the same principles that I had used at all three of my previous businesses in my marketing capacity, and grew this business from 2100 members to over 3000 members, and added two new locations, or at least had shovels in the ground on two locations, in less than nine months, at which point I'd made the business so profitable for the founder, that he fired me because that was his largest expense. And he felt like, he could just ride out the new members and didn't need me anymore. So I took that as a sign from the universe that working for other people just wasn't in the cards for me. And that's when I came together with this idea for Rogue risk, which is ultimately the agency that I founded, it was a digital agency. I coined the term, a human optimized agency, which I can explain to you in a second. But I founded this agency on November, or Jesus March 9 of 2027 days before the zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York, and the governor shut the state down. So I got $45,000 in this business to to launch the agency, and I got nothing. I mean, I mean, we're, we have no idea at this point, what, what COVID is, what's going to happen where it's going to go, we've you know, no one knows. All I know is nobody's picking up the phone and buying insurance. And, you know, I went into a pretty dark place, pulled myself out of it eventually sold our first insurance policy in May our third insurance policy in August, and and from August, on, we implemented our human optimize strategy, and we were able to grow incredibly rapidly. We were one of the fastest growing agencies in the entire country bootstrapped. And things were going really really well. I had five employees, and though I still wasn't paying myself, I could see it right the the entrepreneurial dream of turning that corner starting to pay yourself having a team to hitting a Escape Velocity without having to take any kind of investment capital. It was there, right? Like the the Holy Grail is getting your startup to escape velocity without investment capital, which is very, very rare. But I could see it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm so close. And unfortunately, my, my wife decided that she was not living her best life, and that I was the problem for that. And I got divorced in December of 2020 21. And I was now living in a hotel, with a bag of clothes, with a business that didn't pay me anything. And I had to make some hard choices. Now, thankfully, I had built up enough of a reputation in the industry. And our agency was doing so well. And we were putting such good numbers on the books, that I was able to rapidly spin that into the sale of our business. So while I was very happy with the outcome, very happy with the outcome. It was it was a distressed sale to a certain extent. And I have some lessons that I would love to talk to you about that as far as that goes, and happy to answer any questions you have. So we sold on April 1 of 2022, I officially signed my divorce papers at 10am. I signed the lease on a new apartment at noon, and at 2:30am, I signed the closing docs on my business. I was then the CEO of that business until the end of October 2023. At which point, the company decided that they wanted to we can get into how how important EBITA is to P companies. But they needed to play some games with their EBIT, ah, in order to hit their numbers for the rollover from 2023 to 2024. And we decided to early exit meat, which was fine by me because I had kind of had enough and here we are today.

David: 11:50

Wow, man.

Gary: 11:52

That story credible story.

David: 11:55

Story. Okay, so now, I got all my questions. All right, here we go. Yeah. So I think it's, I appreciate very much the candor. And because you're most people and we interview a lot of people now. And most people only put their Facebook face on a podcast. Right. So I appreciate the candor. So when you're selling the company, because most people think of selling the company is sunshine and rainbows. Yeah. And in your case, it was it wasn't quite that way. I mean, that sounds like the money was good. So awesome. There, but the situation was not great. And it wasn't what you were hoping to build. You weren't wanting to sell that business at that point in time?

Ryan: 12:36

No, no, it was it was early, we could, you know, you could definitely classify it as a distress sale, I would say I was happy with the outcome in so much as the situation that I was in. And certainly, you know, it helped me advance my both personal and professional life forward. But you know, when I thought when I, when I built that company, I had a vision for what I wanted it to be, I saw a gap in the market that still exists today. And it's really what my consulting agency is about. And I don't want to get into that, because it's very specific to the insurance industry and wouldn't be relevant to most of your audience. But there is a gap in the market that still exists that is built on a very traditional and very specific mindset that exists in the insurance industry. And I attacked it with this agency, and it was working now. But there are realities, and this is the thing that I would say to anybody who wants to start a company, or is in the early stages of their entrepreneurial journey. What I did not do is properly prepare my business for the negative outcomes. Right now, I did not see, you know, in the bingo card of life in 2021. I didn't have a wife has midlife crisis and kicks you out of house, right? Like I didn't share that, um, the bingo card. You know, I don't you know, I don't know that we had like a marriage that they create a Disney movie about but but we certainly, you know, seemingly, I thought we were fine. And we're not sure what it is. But my point is we oftentimes as entrepreneurs, and I have to really, really work at this and fail to this day still, we think positive outcomes only right? We think if this this happens if I get to this, then this happens if that. And what I learned through that experience, and now when I'm coaching an entrepreneur or I'm working with one of my consulting clients, etc, or I'm just on a podcast sharing information is it is just as important to if you're going to spend a day game planning all the positive outcomes that could come out of certain activities, etc. Take the next day and do the same exact exercise but for all the negative outcomes. What happens if you get divorced, what happens if the economy explodes? What happened if some sort of regulation comes down and whatever your Doing is no longer allowed, right? Like, you know, a good example is taking someone like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase and how he has navigated the crypto industry and the regulations and, and that kind of stuff like I don't want to dig into his story specifically. But if you read through what he has done and how he has handled different situations, they've prepared that company as much for the downturns as they have the upturns. And it's why, unlike a lot of their competitors, they've been able to ride through all the craziness of, of this very early industry, it's not so much about your big wins, as it's about surviving your losses. If you can figure out how to survive your losses, you will crush as an entrepreneur, if you only set your business up for the big wins, you have all these blind spots, you don't see like I did, and you may have your business may go away, I was fortunate enough that I was able to turn something I did not see coming into at least a a semi positive outcome. But but there's a lot of luck in there. If I didn't find the right partner, if I didn't have some of the connections I had, I, I did not have a lot of runway, I mean, I was running out of money fast. And I just was able to get through, I could have just as easily not had a couple of those connections or a couple those connections couldn't make the deal happen. And all and we just the businesses didn't exist anymore. So you know, that's my my big takeaway from from that portion of my life is, is spend as much time thinking about how to survive losses as you do just planning for wins.

David: 16:34

So let me get practical there for a second. When you're talking about planning for losses, what does that mean, in a practical setting? How do you I mean, obviously, you can't predict a pandemic, or a health scare or whatever. But you can prepare and the generic sense, you might not know what it is, but you're preparing for something bad. Yeah. What does that mean? Do you practice? If you could do it over again? Yeah. How would you have prepared differently practically speaking?

Ryan: 17:00

Yeah. So what I would have done, I don't know if you guys have ever read the book or heard of the book profit first. You know, there's, there's a lot of strategies in there. But the high and the low part is, is pay yourself first. I could have grown slower, while still implementing the strategy that I had, and either just squirreled some business, sorry, squirrel some cash away in a savings account for the business, or at least set myself up with a small amount of income. So that if something like this happened, I could have been okay, right. So Joe, in my particular case, one way of creating sustainability was saying, what, what if my, what if my wife at the time and what if the divorce doesn't happen, but she loses her job? Right, because we were living off her income I was, we had made a conscious decision together that I build this thing up. I wasn't going to take a salary for a period of time I was working couple side jobs. But but you know, I wasn't gonna take a salary. Because this was the moonshot. This was our chance to take something to the next level. And what if she had lost her job? Right? What would we have done that so so I didn't, I in my head said, we're fine. She's got a good job. All I need is three I, you know, I said, somewhere between year two and year three, I will be able to flip this, which we're absolutely on pace for that. And I will start to be able to pay myself and we'll be good. We just didn't make it there.

Christie: 18:23

Big pixel, build world class, custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects, our design and fuse development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients, from startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business.

David: 18:50

So if I'm summing up what you just said, I heard correct me if I'm wrong, what I heard was have some cash. On the side. Now, however, you get that whether it's to pay yourself when you're just getting started out, it is paying yourself a little salary. Or in my case, my healthy fear of the unknown, as always made me very pro cash. And so I always store reserves, we try it all periods of time to have somewhere around two to three months of cash sitting on the side. And that has weathered us through some ugly stuff over the years. And so I've obviously I've mentioned that before, but I think you're following through with that is somehow save pocket some cash on to decide for the unknown, because that takes care of a lot, not everything. If you have a health scare, obviously cash in the bank is not going to change that you're still gonna have a tough time but a lot of emergencies and problems will be solved by having some backup. The other thing I'm hearing you say is and that maybe it's a bit trite, but it's don't put all your eggs in one basket right when you're talking about your vendors in your case. I mean, it's always been a struggle for us. So we build custom software, that's what we do. And it's always been a struggle for us when you have a big new client. And now there, there are a lot of eggs in there. And you're investing in that you're putting people over there, you're doing this and then the other. You don't know what that looks like, in a year, you don't know what that looks like, in five years. I mean, it might be a great client that goes for a long, long time. But eventually, you're gonna get that call, right? It says, Hey, we need to cut back. And that's either a existential moment for you, or it's a bummer moments or a good moment, right. And I started as a horrible client, different conversation. But but having multiple in your case, you were talking about carriers, having multiple vendors that are bringing you revenue is the key. Now again, especially as a small business, I call it when you're in the early stages, it's like you'll wash someone's car for your bill rate, right? At that point, it's tough. And that's where I don't know if that's where I would call it. Where were you? What did you say originally? Escape Velocity? Yeah, I don't know what that term is, in terms of like, is that you've got you're able to pay yourself? Or is it? You're no longer reliant on that one dude, who came in the door? Right? I don't know. There's a lot of ways you can slice. Yeah,

Ryan: 21:11

I think so. You know, I, it all depends on what type of business you have. And what that looks like, for me. And my definition of what that looks like is you're able to live your life in your business, and you're not making sacrifices for it as an entrepreneur. Right. So as an early stage, entrepreneur, no matter what, whether you're scoring a little bit of money away, or whatever, you're losing time, or you're losing a lot of money, or whatever it is, you're making sacrifices to grow that business. Now, the hope. And the whole reason you start the business in the first place, is eventually you are able to hit a point, which I refer to as escape velocity in which you are doing this thing that you love this entrepreneurial mission that you love your, you're doing it. And you're able, you don't have to sacrifice everything, you've you've duplicated yourself enough and built enough systems, processes, etc, that you can actually have a good family life, whatever that looks like for you or good life, you're able to pay yourself enough so that you're happy, maybe it's more than you've ever made before or whatever, but you're making an amount of income, that's great for you, right, and you're able to have both the things that is possible, and it should be the entrepreneurial dream, I think it's been I think the pornography of entrepreneurship has ruined what it really is, for a lot of people, unfortunately, especially young people, it's like, I kill myself on 18 hours of of work every day and a bottle full of Adderall and hope for a $10 million exit. So I'm right, right. Like, that's not what it has ever been in the past, and not what I think it should be in the future, there's just this brief period of time, where we've had a few, you know, you know, opportunities for a very small number of people to actually have those things happen. And, you know, but when we really think about it, it's like, pick something you love, figure out how to make money. And at some point, you're, you're gonna have to kill yourself at first, you're gonna have to give up time with your family or your life, or your friends or your hobbies, you're gonna make less money at first. And then as you get better at it, and as that business grows, and you duplicate yourself in the business systems, processes, etc. Bringing new referral partners, suppliers, you're able to work back into now I get to do this thing I really enjoy. That's mine. That is a that is a vision of what I believe is possible. And I also get to have this other side of my life, I don't believe in work life balance, but I get to have what I want out of the other side of my life. That to me, is where we're trying to get to you know, and I just, I unfortunately, think we come in, and all we see is positive, all we think in our game plan in our business plan is positive, positive, positive, positive positive, which we need. All I'm advocating for, is do that same. Here's what happens if everything's amazing, do that same exercise, where are the places where this could go bad, and, and then you shouldn't not do the business because there's places that it should go bad. It's just awareness, that's all it is. Just Just be aware of those things. You know, like, like, in your case, you know, when I say when I bring on a big client, in the in the contractual portion of it is, you know, we go through all the amazing stuff, right? You're going to pay me this and we're going to build this and everything's gonna be amazing. And all your wildest dreams are gonna come true or money is going to rain down from the sky, and everything's gonna be amazing. What happens next year, when you get a promotion, and you have bigger problems to solve, and someone else comes in what happens then? Because that guy might not like me, or she might have a best friend who does what I do and wants to use her friend instead of me. What do we do that? How does that go?

David: 24:46

I heard a story. years ago, years and years and years ago when I was a noob in my world, and they were talking about hey, we I don't remember even who this was, but I'm so bad at attribution anyway. He, he was saying we had a great relationship with Microsoft. And we were, you know, his big, big client of ours. And then the guy we've been working with left, yep. And that relationship with Microsoft was actually a relationship with Bob. And that relationship was really good. But then Bob left and Microsoft was like, I don't know, you, you, we have no contact with you. Let's start over. And everything went really bad, because then the wanting different pricing and this and the other, and it went really badly. And he's like, don't ever get married to one of these big companies, because you're never marrying the company, you're marrying the person in the company, and they may or may not last and or get promoted. Like you say, it might be a good thing, Bob goes up the food chain. But that's, that's where it's totally

Ryan: 25:47

do that. And so this is why I do this. This is this is a thought experiment I do with every single one of my large clients. So there's a portion of our business that is more like self learning and coaching, etc. But the large clients that we work with who pass you know, real significant money. And, you know, because I've had this consulting firm throughout all of this, and even speaking gigs, this goes for speaking gigs, too, because I've had in the past, before I learned this lesson, I had someone booked me for a gig. And a month later, they left for another job. And their replacement comes in and goes, Hey, yeah, we really want this person over here, we're gonna go a different direction. Nice. And now I have booked on my calendar said no to other events, you know, in my mind, I'm already spending the fee I'm gonna get you know, and poof, just like that it's gone. So, a good thought experiment, if you're listening to this, a good thought thought experiment to work through with every single one of your large customers, or, or vendors, whatever someone crucial relationships is, look, David, dude, I love you, you love me, this is gonna be amazing, we're gonna crush it, I can't wait, this is gonna be phenomenal. Literally can't wait to get to work. Let's just, let's just talk about one more thing before we're done. What happens if you get hit by a bus? What happens if you get by bus? What you know, and you're gonna, and what you'll see is that most people are not prepared for this question. And now you get a feel for what you really mean to them. This is the really interesting part. Because of David, really, you know, in this case, you know, for those listening at home or watching whatever, if David really cares about me, he's gonna go, You know what, man, let's put a clause in the contract that says that if you know, if I'm gone, you get, you know, no one can come in and change this contract for six months. Or, well, let's put in a 20% Exit fee if the if we close the contract before completion, or, you know, insert whatever potential solution that person has, right? If you do this is this is setting your business up to survive losses. Because, you know, and I don't mean to be so morbid with you get hit by a bus, but it does make people think, right. It's an it makes them it makes you think through and and your partner think through what happens when this goes bad. We do not think through this and contracts. And what it will do is it will save you legal fees, let's just say you guys had a cert, you're nine months into the project. And you know, you realize that it's just not going the way you want, you're just not the right fit for them, you thought it would be amazing. And you've gotten nine months into the project, they don't really want what they said they want, they don't really want to spend the money. You've you've got them to a certain point, and you're just like, Guys, this is not working, what do we do, right? And if you've built in a mutual Separation Agreement, some sort of period, like, these are the kinds of things we're now instead of you stopping working, and I'm assuming you are you didn't have to sue them because they didn't pay you. You just go into contract and you Okay, it says right here, you don't want us to work on this project anymore. That's okay, great. You pay us the final 20% Boom, boom, we love you. If you ever need us in the future, give us a call. We'd love to work with you, sorry, didn't work this out and everyone walks away. Or you have $25,000 in legal fees as you try to figure out who owes who, what and how much more work you have to do. And that's when I'm talking about surviving your losses. It's thinking through these it's thinking through the things that could go wrong. Not just thinking about how amazing it is because what most people do is they go, Oh my god, David's about to pay me this amount of money and they start vibrating and they can't wait to tell their spouse and their friends and post it in their group chat with all their college buddies. And they're like you can't believe who just signed a contract with me. And they, they forget about all the things that can happen that may have nothing to do with your work. It may oftentimes it doesn't have anything to do with your work. It's just relationships and life.

David: 29:59

It's funny you mentioned the proverbial bus. So we have, that's like a huge part of our business in general, because in our world, the proverbial bus means your developer left. Yeah, because developers are notoriously they hop a lot, especially well, I don't know if it's true now. But they, they there's always a greener pasture, right. And so a lot of our clients over the years before they met us, they had a dude or dudette, who's building their software. And they, you know, went to a greener pasture, and now they're holding the bag, because there was no concept of the proverbial bus. And so we actually are very proactive for this very reason. Our clients we talked about, we're gonna protect you from the proverbial but almost as a sales thing for us. It's, it wasn't started out that way. But it's kind of become that because it's so rare. We never have, for instance, one guy on a project, it's always paired up, we never do, you know, we never just stick a contract around there and always gone. And then we're out of luck. We we purposefully set it up, and we call it the proverbial bus. So that we also like to call it winning the lottery is the other side of it, that's the happy version of it. But it's it is something that a lot of businesses don't do. And it really can wreck you, it's my I had a friend who ran an IT company, you know, servers and hardware and stuff. And he was like, what our big bread and butter was, was selling backups to your data, because statistics showed, and I'm sure this has changed some but 80% of small businesses who lost their data, you know, let's say their hard drive melted down, whatever. They never stood the business backup. Because all that critical client data, all that is gone. And they don't have the ability to stand up. And he's like, we would sell our services, based on hey, we're going to protect you against that catastrophic event. And that's just there's always a million versions of that. Yeah, but it is something I don't think enough entrepreneurs think of,

Ryan: 31:56

it's not sexy. That's why it's not sex sales is sexy, product development is sexy, like these these things, marketing, they're sexy, and I get it, I trust me, I would rather think about those things. And frankly, I you know, this isn't my favorite talk of topics to talk about when it comes to entrepreneurship. I just, you know, feel like it's something that we don't discuss enough. And I hate when I see or hear, or have to speak with an entrepreneur, who has something happened, that could have been prevented, if only they had thought about what was possible. And because because it's preventable. And, you know, I look at a lot of second time entrepreneurs, and they share this thought, right, they, they're second time entrepreneurs, because the first time is usually not a huge win. It's usually, hey, we ran into the side of a mountain because of, you know, insert reason. And now we're going to sidestep that mistake this time. And, you know, not that you should be not you should feel bad about that. I think it's just part of the journey. It may even be your fourth or fifth or sixth time that you learn all the lessons you need. I mean, I've been fired by the last four companies that I work for. You know, and I've learned hard lessons from that I had to take a lot of look, I had to do a lot of a lot of gazing into the mirror to figure out why that was. And, you know, some of it, I think, is circumstantial. And some of it is, you know, I'm maybe not necessarily built to work inside a large bureaucracy, actually, I can tell you with, you know, very sound mind that I am not meant to work inside a large bureaucracy. But you know, just these little thought experiments and conversations are important, because hopefully somebody listening to this hears it and goes, Oh, man, maybe we are over indexed on this supplier or, or this is also true, if you're the business owner, maybe you have an employee in your company who you're a little over indexed on that if that employee leaves, you'd be in a really rough spot, right? Like, it is not. It is not a badge of honor. To have an employee who you just lean on and give all this weight to Right. Like, like, yes, they're important. And you can consider yourself a family and all that's great. But that person could get hit by a bus. And then what do you do, right? That that happens? Like, what happens if your best employee, your best salesperson, your best developer, you know, whatever your business is, what happens if that person leaves? What happens if that person passes away? What are you going to do? Can you survive? What if they're the only person that has relationship with your biggest customer? How do you survive that that thing? And, again, not fun topics, but when we're talking about, you know, you want you want to get this escape velocity, you want to have that big exit. This is how you have the big exit, you survived the losses because you are going to have losses before you get the big exit. It's just the name Sure, yeah. So

David: 35:02

in my case, I have an agreement with all of my important employees. They're never going to leave. Right, Gary? That's, that's right. Right. Okay. So I, I there was a couple of ways I wanted to wrap this up. I mean, we've we've kind of focused on some very important kind of down or topics. Yeah. So one thing I was going to mention, and I think that this is, it's funny, you say this, if you are someone who's listened to this podcast, and you're having a tough time staying with your boss happy with you, you might be an entrepreneur, you just don't know. I had, I didn't get fired a lot. But I did have a tough time. Keep being managed. I don't think it's mean. It's not like I have a trouble with authority kind of thing. But I just wanted to go my own way. Yeah. And I think that's a core tenant of being an entrepreneur, someone who has ideas and vision and get ready to jump off into the fire, is they are kind of hard to employ, because they have a lot of ideas. Yeah,

Ryan: 36:02

so okay, I have two thoughts on this one, you could be right to. You could be delusional, or not you personally, but the first Sure. Gary

David: 36:11

and I are old enough. Especially Gary. He's super old.

Gary: 36:15

Crusty, old, crusty.

David: 36:17

Oh, that's, that's what nevermind. They're my family, Bella. So I remember the time when entrepreneur was a fancy word for unemployed. Yes. Yeah, it did not used to have the cachet. It somewhat has now. I mean, I work with a lot. And I do a lot of mentoring with college students and stuff like that. And, and I love that excitement. I love that, that desire to be an entrepreneur. But I sometimes advise, you know, sometimes you just need to get beat up a little bit in the real world, before you dive in. Because that experience you're going to get in the real world working for somebody else. Learning from someone who's good and bad, is often exactly what you need before you go out on your own and try to do your own thing.

Ryan: 36:58

Dude couldn't have made progress successful. If I hadn't had the previous years experience of learning what I liked and didn't like about all these different businesses and bosses and systems and processes. I was able to launch a business during COVID Sell it despite some of the stuff that we talked about sell it and exit in less than four years very successfully. I couldn't have done it could not absolutely could not have done that. If I hadn't had all the previous experiences. So like, wow, while there is part of me that it would have been easier to go through all those things in my early 20s when I didn't have kids and you know, all this kind of stuff. I I do think that we shouldn't poopoo the later in life entrepreneur, right. Like, like, I wasn't an entrepreneur until I was 39. I wasn't I you know, today, I know how to start a business. I know what it takes all the nonsense that comes with it. But it took me 39 years to get there.

David: 37:57

So normally, this is when Gary speaks which he doesn't speak a lot. For some reason. I don't know why he's so quiet. It's part of the way and it

Ryan: 38:04

looks so insightful to it looks like he's got really interesting things to say that's

Gary: 38:08

that's the age. There's also the possibility that I'm just never allowed to talk or I'm edited out.

David: 38:15

Why would you say that? But normally, we ask this big question. I mean, Gary, Gary chat over here on the side, to make sure we're asking the right questions. And we always ask this the question we mentioned before, but Gary, I I feel like we've been talking about this the whole time. You've

Gary: 38:34

answered the question since we begin the conversation. So yeah, I was gonna ask your top three pieces of advice for an entrepreneur new business, but you've covered the groundwork of that really well the entire episode. So unless you have a one more

David: 38:48

little piece of advice, the top nugget,

Ryan: 38:50

yeah, um, I the last is the very last thing I'll say and this is personal to me, but hopefully it helps. I am a highly unorganized person in general in life, I just am I know that about myself. If you are going to be an entrepreneur, I highly recommend you take a very honest look at your strengths and weaknesses. And as early as you possibly can fill your weaknesses with someone who has the opposite skills, i i I cannot stress that enough. If you it is so hard to start and grow a business and you really need to dial into your strengths early whatever those are if it's creativity organization or developing or whatever that strength is right. It is crucial that you spend as much time in that high value strength as you can early on. And if you can find someone like like early on in finding peak I brought actually brought with me my head of operations from Rogue risk with me too. At peak, but we were only a month and a half old in our consultancy, so we don't have a ton of income coming in. And a lot of our contracts are spread out over time. So I convinced her to come in on a rev share, I just said, look, for every dollar I make, you know, this is how much you make and bump up. And we're both incentivized to grow this thing together. And I need you because you're the right brain to my left brain, or, you know, I'm the creative side, and she's your, and we, I know, we worked well together. And she's fine with the fact that I'm scattered, and I'll throw her stuff. And she puts it into these great charts and lists. And that is what I need as an entrepreneur. So find that person, it could be a VA, it could be your spouse, it could be you know, a friend, whatever, as quickly as you can try to find someone who even on a part time basis can fill some of your weaknesses so that you can spend the max time in your strengths.

Gary: 40:51

Well said, good piece of advice. We've heard similar kind of versions of that over the last year. So there's even some people we've had on here that provide that as a service. Yeah, so yeah, but that is, I believe, a critical role for what you're saying, you have to find something that's going to pick up what you can't quite do on your own. Yeah.

Ryan: 41:15

Yeah, I, you just to grow fast, you have to spend your time in your strengths. So just know what they are. And don't try to be the I'm terrible at accounting. Terrible. I'm good at like money management. But like the accounting part, I'm just the idea of slowing down and we you probably cut this part, but like the idea of slowing down and like doing the books, literally, I'd rather want to You just punch me right in the face. If you were like do the books this month, or punch me in the face, I'd be a punch just punch me in the face. I'd rather so like, you know, we outsource that. And you know, and Clarissa is good at that stuff, too. She does a lot of it. But it just, I don't know, I just, I have I learned really early. I'm not good at these things. Or my brain just won't let me go there for whatever reason, so I just don't.

Gary: 42:01

Yeah, well, if anybody wants to learn more about your business or your consultancy, how can they reach out and get ahold of you? LinkedIn,

Ryan: 42:08

Ryan Hanley, you'll, you'll find me on Ryan underscore Hanley on Instagram. Those are the two social medias that I use the most. The Instagram one is more ubiquitous. It's more like leadership and entrepreneurial stuff. The LinkedIn tends to be very insurance focused. So if you're not interested in that, you know, make your decisions. And just in general, you can find me at Ryan hanley.com. And that's we're still launching our website finding peak. So right now that redirects to my personal. We're launching all the branding marketing kind of official launch in February of 2024. So depending on when you listen to this,

Gary: 42:42

we have all those links in the show notes as well. Yeah,

Ryan: 42:46

thank you. And I appreciate it. Guys. This has been great. Thank you so much.

David: 42:49

Yeah, thank you for joining us. It's been a great conversation. And with that, we are out. Thank you guys very much. We will be back next week. Have a good one.

Christie: 42:59

Hi, I'm Christie Bronto. Content Marketing Director here at Big pixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the biz dev podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email Hello at Doug big pixel.net the biz dev podcast is produced and presented by big pixel. See you next week. Until then follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook threads, YouTube and LinkedIn