Founder's Story - Beyond Limits: Where Business and Media Converge, A Founder's Story with Rob Dyrdek | S2: E1

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

For the past two decades, Rob Dyrdek has built a flourishing empire by identifying and uniquely leveraging the intersection between business and media. A natural and gifted storyteller, he has continually refined his multiplatform approach, and today sits at the helm of the Dyrdek Machine, a full-service venture studio, founded on the concept of building “forever brands”—with media squarely at the center.   Subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss out on exclusive interviews and special content: https://foundersstory.beehiiv.com/subscribe For more info on guests and future episodes visit pix11.com/impact and https://fox5sandiego.com/fox-5-partners/impactful/  Our Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. Rob, what was your journey like to get where you are? Look, I've had an unusual journey, you know, unlike a traditional educated entrepreneur who maybe went to college, got an MBA, started a company. In my early youth, I was surrounded by all different types of people that created all different types of companies, right? And that was a really close friend of mine that owned a skate shop. I watched him build company after company, and then his friends built company after company. So as a youth, I looked at my journey in life was, well, I'm just like them. I will probably also start companies myself. And that's what led to me building my very first company when I was 18 years old.

Wow. And does anyone in your family, an entrepreneur, what is the driving force? You know, look, I think, you know, I'm raising my children to grow up with an entrepreneurial mindset, you know, sort of approaching this concept of put a vision to what you want to create and build the steps backwards. My son recently said he's got the perfect idea. It's honey on pizza, and I'm going to call it Delish Honey. And I was able to buy delishhoney.com. He's five years old. I was raised with a family that just thought if you could graduate high school, your number one shot at having a high quality of life was just getting to college. I didn't believe in that path. Of course, I quit high school at 16, became a professional skateboarder, started my after company after company for years, co-founded 16 different businesses till I finally launched a business that creates businesses in 2016. And I've launched 18 since then.

Wow. What an amazing work. Now, what was the most challenging experience you have had to overcome? You know, look, I think like, the problem with business is it's so complex. And you tend to either partner with people that sort of balance your weaknesses, or you you learn through failure of what those weaknesses are. So for me, I think I spent many years building different companies and trying all different types of concepts without seeing business multidimensionally. So since I was such a creative marketing mind, I was always product focused and like, oh, people are going to love this product. And this is such a good idea. But I lacked the deeper dimension of understanding how that business would actually be brought to market, be sustainable, and ultimately the financial side of that business, right? And

when I finally connected operations and finance to my brand marketing and product mind, that's when I really, those struggles from my early years of being an entrepreneur ended up fading away. That's awesome. And knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? You know, look, to me, I always preach to start at the end, right? Decide what you want out of a business before you ever decide to do it. And that is like, okay, I want to build a business that gets to 5 million in sales and has a million in profit that I split with two partners and having a $5 million business where we each take home 300 grand a year would be a dream scenario because I'm going to pay, you know, 40% of that in taxes, and then I'm going to save 20%.

And by the time I'm 60 years old, I'm going to have 2 million in an IRA and an index fund, and I'm going to go live on a beach. I like to preach that you are not only the visionary of your business, but you're the visionary of your life life and you've got to integrate both of them and create a plan so when you have business success that you have life success simultaneously and what is your secret sauce how did you scale all these businesses you're running so many businesses i mean what's secret sauce you know i i i don't i think it's it's's the secret sauce? You know, I think the secret sauce is systematic evolution, right? You grow and evolve over time. Now, if you grow and evolve with purpose and behind a quantitative growth trajectory, a great plan, a great goal, then you're seeing your growth and evolution. And now someone like me, who's done so many different businesses, your ability to see

business is so much more intuitive and so much more deep that you're making decisions and partnering with people and ideas that build quicker with a lot less effort and have a higher probability of success. Because I like to say business is only fun when it works. When business works, it's one of the thrilling, most extraordinary processes of creation. But when it doesn't, it's one of the most painful. And for me, over time, I've just learned to get better and better at intuitively seeing the depth of a business or an idea at the very beginning and building the pathway towards success and then doing it over and over again. So how do you consider yourself? Are you the visionary guy or are you the number two that execute the whole company or are you both well to me i i'm i'm both but i consider myself like a visionary sherpa

you know what i mean where i'm i have the ability to see like the future and the micro present right i can see the macro and the micro. And for other people with great ideas, other visionaries, my process and experience can validate their idea. And then I can act as their visionary coach and help be their strategic force to help guide them to realize their vision. I think that's one of the things I love so much about being a CEO of a business that creates businesses. We co-find every business and start it from the idea stage or pre-revenue. We go through this same cycle of zero to be able to do that over and over. And I love having vision alignment with other visionaries and then help guiding them to the promised land. I love it. So how many exit now total? We have five exits, a little over 500 million since 2016. And again, a couple companies that have got to really

significant scale, Outstanding Foods that we hope to take public soon. And then, you know, a couple of our heroes in our recent launch, Lusso Cloud, a comfort footwear brand and Mindright, our brain food company is just two other really high velocity growth companies that we launched recently. Wow. And so what does leadership mean to you? You know, look, leadership means a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, you know, leadership is really the guiding light for how and where we should go and what we should believe in. Right. And you have to instill belief in those that work for you, that you have to have clarity on what you're hoping to achieve and how to achieve it so that while you're making progress towards your goals and your clear KPIs, everybody can be energized by the fact that they're actually achieving what they said they would do, thus building belief. Because you really build belief when you begin to make progress towards really big goals, right?

Otherwise, if you're not making progress or you're not clear, that's bad leadership. And that's when those that work for you aren't sure what direction they're going or ultimately what does it mean to win here? I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs in general overlook when trying to lead a group of people on a singular idea. Absolutely. Now, can you take me back to that very first company? What is that like preparing to IPO uh no I've never I've never uh taken a company IPO yet this is uh you know I I look I I was one of my founders I sat on the board I I sat on the board earlier this year of a company that went public one of my previous founders uh but I was on the board for like three months and I I'm like, I can't do this. I don't like for someone that like lives and dies on like, let's start it from a conversation, see the product for the first time, I'll get it to market for the first time. Like, it's like,

I love the journey. To me, IPO level, being in these board meetings for a public company was like, just sucked the life out of me. And I resigned very quickly. And again, even when we eventually, I'm on the board of Outstanding Foods, when it eventually goes public, I will then step back so I don't have to go through that sort of aspect. I love the journey, right? Whether it is driving a company to profitability, a lot of our companies are just built to be smaller and kick off a ton of cash. A lot of more growth companies that are built for the exit. A couple were built to go public, which we haven't done. Outstanding Foods is the first one for that. But it's the cycle is what I live for. It's the like, this is what we're going to do. Then here's the plan. Then the

chaos that ensues and constantly evolving and changing and evolving and changing and growing and expanding into the possibility of what the idea is. And then realizing the potential in the form of a return on your capital invested under a time frame to deliver you an ROI and an IRR, it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary. You love to get your hands dirty and get in there. Yeah, it's just way, way more fun for me to live through what they refer to as the valley of debt, you know, because at the end of the day they say all these you know almost all uh ventures fail in the first year 18 months and it really is um you know called the valley of death because you're so excited before you launch it you think your idea is amazing you think your product's extraordinary it's the idea of it's so amazing. Then the moment you launch it, it becomes real.

And then it gets so real as you're fighting to try to figure out what's happening. How is this all working? Then you begin to evolve rapidly and then begin, there's a point I like to call it, you know, it's sort of the horizon after you launch a business where you realize how much you don't know. And at that point, like you realize how much you actually have to do to make this a success and how hard it actually is going to be. And that's where most people quit. And some people get energized by the clarity and then work even harder and then eventually find product market fit and go on to have a successful venture. But when people die in the valley of death, it is because they finally can see how hard it is to run a business and they decide it's not for them. Yeah, absolutely. And

they said it's only 4% of a company that's as a revenue of two million dollars is like four percent very low yeah i love how you mentioned the valley of death i'm so familiar with that with scaling up system by bern harness and he wrote that book he mentioned that a lot the valley of death is one of my favorite um so uh do you have a mentor rob you know i, I have a lot of great, like, you know, high level, like, business friends, you know what I mean? group. That's sort of a mentor group. That's 15 entrepreneurs that get together once a month and talk about all aspects of life and business. And I think that that group is where a lot of just my, where I can, you know, step back, reflect and evolve and hear how other people are managing different aspects of their business or their wealth or their life. That's, that's sort of an important thing to do, but, but no direct mentors.

All right. Thank you. And what do you think of all this NFT and metaverse or web three, were you able to do, you know, take a look at it? What do you think of it? What's going on? I mean, to me, there's just no doubt. It's the absolute future. You know, I think it's, it's a little bit confusing, I think, to me, there's just no doubt it's the absolute future. You know, I think it's a little bit confusing, I think, because there are so many different layers to it. And, you know, as you're trying to understand it, you're like, oh, is it cryptocurrency? Is it trying to replace money? Okay, is it a blockchain? What does the blockchain do exactly? Like, oh, is it NFT? Okay, now people are trading jpegs right like i think there's just this like you know almost like how the internet felt in like 97 when it was like there's no way you would ever put your credit card on the internet you would never buy something for real

like you know i think it's that sort of thing. And it's fundamentally, you know, currencies will have to be regulated to some point. You know, digital assets is is without a doubt the NFT is going to be so many more implications way beyond, you know, trading some, you know, $500,000 monkey that you're going to put in your, like, social media icon to show that you're balling. You know what I mean? But, yeah, I think it's a lot bigger than people realize. And everything is going to be like traded in, in this digital world and digital status. And it seems so hard for us to wrap our heads around like, like, Oh, you're somebody's buying like a plot of land in the metaverse right now.

Like, but it is, it is no different than any other asset and any other sort of form of entertainment in exchange for time and attention and connection with other human beings. And I just think it's one of those things that we're so at the very early stage of, but will be a huge part of our world to come for very long. Absolutely. We just launched our first NFT yesterday. Yeah. Would you guys make it yeah so we launch it and the utility piece of that is people will go through the master class what is nft blockchain web ar br how to invest in virtual land because the end of the day that's where we're

going yeah right yeah so good for you i hope you make some money off of it. Yeah. We're excited. So we're going to be hustling. Rob, what, you know, business advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur? Look, I think like, you know, I preach to everybody that at the end of the day, you are still making a business, right? You can have a vision. You can have a purpose. You can have an innovative product. At the end of the day, it's still going to be about how much revenue you make, how much

of your expenses to acquire that revenue, and ultimately, how much cash do you have at the end of all of that? And then understanding the economics and of how your business works above all and how you're going to go through the process to acquire and retain customers. It doesn't matter what type of business it is. It's like you have to always be looking at it through its financial viability because you're in business, sure, to fulfill a vision and make an impact, but you're never going to do that if you do not have a sustainable financial and business model that allows you to scale and grow and be a business that can be stay alive with intent because I think a lot of people overlook a lot of these more simple cost structures because they just want to make the product bring it to markets they think people will love it and then they'll figure it out

and I think a lot of people will be singularly focused on their idea and product rather than thinking more of like how could they build a platform and and see out to where they could their product line can scale and grow their business right i think you know so often um you can only learn these things through experience but i really believe that you know everybody needs to always think like with the financial quality of what they're going into first instead of just idea and product. I love it. It's all about net profit at the end of the day. Now, Rob, how do you want to be remembered? You know, look, I think that that I'm you got to understand that I've had an interesting evolution throughout my entire life right so I was a professional skateboarder entrepreneur that

had all these different companies and then I evolved and became a television star and entrepreneur with all these different companies and then as that's evolved now, I'm transitioning to, you know, more? Whether that's developing an integrated system to build your business or you treat your life like an integrated system to systematically evolve into the ideal version of who you are and what your true potential is, right? I think at the end of the day, I would like to be most known for teaching people how to be visionaries of their own lives and give them the tools and the systems

on how they can realize their ideal life. Wow. And Rob, where can they find you? What's your social site? Dyrdekmachine..com and rob dirdick on all the socials well rob this is really awesome and honored having you here today we hope you enjoyed the show don't forget to rate review and subscribe and visit katehancock.com so you don't miss out on the next episode