Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Big Badasses in Business

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Welcome back to The Radcast! Ready for something extraordinary? Get ready to meet 6 influential entrepreneurs and dive into their incredible business journey’s.We bring different episodes together to create an unmissable lineup as they explore how much of a business mastermind they are born with or acquired over time. Listen while Ryan Alford talks with Kyle Creek, Jaren Johnston, Bruce Buffer, Sawyer Hemsley, Shawne Merriman, and Howard Panes share their fiery journey full of knowledge bombs that will have you totally pumped up for success. Don't miss this power-packed episode overflowing with knowledge - tune in now!Key notes from this episode:They share the secret to their groundbreaking success (00:01)How they started their entrepreneurial journey (01:01)What made Kyle insta-famous and his perspective (02:34)What made Jaren a badass country music writer (06:23)How Bruce worked his way up to being the UFC voice (10:21)What made Sawyer take the leap from an ordinary life to co-founding Crumbl Cookies? (15:04)How Shawne transitioned from being a all-pro NFL linebacker to being a successful co-founder of Lights out (20:26)Howard shares how he made it to - not millions, but billions! (24:39)Their mission to create an iconic legacy that will leave its mark for generations (29:30)This episode is packed with energy, wisdom, and passion and we know you will get a ton of value from this.To keep up with Kyle Creek, follow him on Instagram @sgrstk and his linktree https://linktr.ee/thecaptainTo keep up with Jaren Johnston, follow him on Instagram @thejaren or his website https://www.thecadillacthree.com/To keep up with Bruce Buffer, follow him on Instagram @brucebufferufc and or his podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/its-time-w-bruce-buffer/id971951176To keep up with Sawyer Hemsley, follow him on Instagram @sawyerhemsley or @crumblcookiesTo keep up with Shawne Merriman, follow him on Instagram @shawnmerriman or @lightsoutbrandTo keep up with Howard Panes, follow him on Instagram @howardpanes and his website https://mightyyum.com/Learn more by visiting our website at www.theradcast.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/RadicalHomeofTheRadcastIf you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, Like, Share, and leave us a review! If 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. 

This folder called Good Fuckin' Ideas. If you don't like what I'm about to present to you, I'm gonna put it in this folder and I'm gonna sell it to one of your competitors next year. The whole game is being in the right circles and being around the right people. Buff life with capital B, which means be. Be, be who you are, be the best you can be.

Being young in the industry and being a leader there, that's a hardship. Consistency is key. My whole life is structured. And so what do you need out here to be successful? Two things, discipline and structure. To be successful or to find success or to find happiness, the most important thing is to find what you're passionate about. You're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford.

The marketing impressed me with you guys. I actually admired you from afar. So I was like, okay, this is a company that knows what they're doing. So talk to me about the brand. As much as I enjoy advertising, there's still nothing that I enjoy more than being able to write in a way that truly connects with people. For two and a half years, we built up our own fan base the old school way and got it to a point to where it was big enough, but we couldn't get any bigger unless we brought in the right partners. It's time is such a strong, somewhat generic statement that I own, you know, in respect to where I own in

trademark wise, that I don't want to abuse it. I want to build it. So it's careful marketing, careful, consistent marketing. The thing that we found most successful is what flavors are relatable to our consumers. So you think back to your childhood, you know, did you grow up eating cinnamon rolls or cosmic brownies? Or, you know, did you love the icy flavors from the gas station? What can you pull a story from and put into a cookie? I look back on everything that I did when I was a kid or even, you know, having a nickname like Lights Out at 16 years old and getting a tattoo on my right forearm. It was branding. It was marketing. I think that we just use the word for it now. So, you know,

though I had mentors and things that was doing this long before anybody came into the picture. I'm a very curious individual and I read everything and I want to know how they did it, why they did it. What was their mindset? What were their failures? So yes, this has been, this what was their mindset, what were their failures. So yes, this has been baked in me for a long time. We're talking social media. We're talking to Kyle Creek, the captain.

What's up, man? Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to be here. Your best work, which has made you Insta-famous, Twitter-famous, whatever you want to call it, but it's obviously helped your career, helped your social media. The campaigns the clients turn down are the ones that blow up on social media. Any client out there listening, I know some of you are past, present executives. Yeah, you got to push the envelope if you want to move the needle. It's true. I actually have a folder on my desktop to this day, and this folder's saved, and it's called good fucking ideas

i probably i haven't looked lately but i've been saving ideas there since maybe 2015 and every new laptop i get i transfer the folder over and so there's maybe a thousand pieces of of copy or scripts or different campaign ideas in there and i used to pitch clients often when i was doing a lot of new business and i would pull up my desktop as the pitch started. And I'd point to that folder. And I'd say, see this folder called good fucking ideas. If you don't like what I'm about to present to you, I'm going to put it in this folder and I'm going to sell it to one of your competitors next year. I started leading my pitches that way. And it helped me get a lot of ideas across because they realized I would do that. And I still, every now and then when I'm consulting, I go back and I find stuff that I wrote in 2016 that I can update.

And it's still a very solid campaign. It would work correctly. And so it's a folder I've had exactly for the reason you're saying. Whenever I tried to push the envelope for a client and they didn't want to, I just believed in it enough to know that someday it would work. And I've just been saving them and collecting. It's cool to win ad awards and it's cool to get stuff like that, but there's nothing that will make me feel more fulfilled as a writer than hearing that I pulled someone out of a dark spot or I helped them laugh when there was nothing else in their life to laugh about. Where does your point of view come from? The captain

that instigates, that writes this way, has a certain style that came from somewhere. It's all his own, which is, I'm sure you're an original and you are. Something built your perception, your take on the world, your way of thinking. I would think there's been molding along the way. I think the way I was raised helped shape a lot of my view of the world because I was raised in Utah. I was raised in LDS. I was a Mormon. And growing up, I felt very suppressed and I felt very censored.

And I felt like I had a very constricted view of the world because everything was viewed for this lens of the religion. And if I was going through something as a teenager that all teenagers go through and I wanted advice from my parents or advice from one of my leaders, I would always receive the answer in the form of, you should go look this up in the scriptures, or you should pray about it. And it drove me crazy because what I wanted at that time was to have a human talk to me as another human. It made me feel very misunderstood, and it made me feel alone. So for many years, my primary fuel in life was trying to prove to my family I didn't need their religion to be successful. I didn't need their religion to be happy. And so that would probably be where some of my harshness came from, because it came from a rebellious energy. The other side of that is I wanted other

people to not feel alone, because I had felt that way for so long. And I wanted people to feel understood. I wanted people to feel like there was others out there like them. And so that's where I'd say that mold of the two came together to where I had that rebellious energy. But also, I wanted to genuinely help people not feel the way I did. And see it as an example to other people that, listen, you can speak up and you can receive criticism and your life can go on. Jared Johnston, what's up, brother? Hey, man. Thanks for having me on here, dude. Hey, man.

My pleasure. Holy shit. This guy's written like 12 songs that I sing in the shower that I didn't even know were his original writings. You're a badass, man. I love it. Let's give everybody a little bit. I know we could talk for probably two hours about your story but you know maybe give us the a little bit of that background and your history and what makes you such a damn good country music writer

man i grew up in nashville was born and raised which is kind of that's not the normal situation you know they i think they kind of call us unicorns the people that are actually born in nashville rather than moving to nashville and i up, you know, went to school downtown at Heme Fog. My dad was always a drummer, a grand ol' opera. He was a drummer for a bunch of older country artists in the 80s and early 90s. And then he started pitching songs, which means, you know, like finding songs from writers and taking them to John Michael Montgomery or whoever and trying to get them recorded. And so I saw that at a very early age. And I remember seeing how excited dad would get when he got a whole quote unquote, a hold, which means the

artist or the manager liked it for whoever. And I was just like, kind of mesmerized by that whole thing, like the equation of sitting down writing a song by yourself or with friends. And then two weeks later, it's, you know, a recording by Garth Brooks or whoever, you know what I mean? So I kind of started touring when I was 18, playing drums for a bunch of bands. And then I started writing songs, man, real serious about it about 2005. Got my first publishing deal. And from then on, it's just kind of been a crazy country Western ride. How do you classify your writing style? I mean, do you think you have a certain style?

I think the reason I've had the success that I've had, or at least part of it, part of the whole game is being in the right circles and being around the right people. And like I said, it's also who you surround yourself with, the people that you're writing with, and the people that work your songs, that are working for your publishers and stuff. But yeah, I just try to go into every room with something a little different and try to do things the way that aren't expected.

The business of country music. You know, you've been in it for a while. I mean, 05, like you said, maybe getting your feet really into it with the songwriting. I mean, you've seen a lot of change, right? It can be pretty brutal. An example, I started in 2005. That's when I got my first publishing deal, making 30 grand a year. I had to turn in 10 songs a year, which is 10 hundred percent songs, meaning like if it's a two way, it counts as half of one, you know what I mean? Or three way, so on and so forth. And it was a co-pub deal, which means I own half, they own half. So that's a pretty good deal coming into the game.

And my publisher was a really nice guy. He helped me out. So late 2010, where I had my first number one, that's five years, you know, like and there would be a couple songs that got recorded in between there. But you're not really seeing money from that unless it's on the radio. So you're living off that publishing you know the 30 grand a year and you're trying to keep that deal every year too which is if you're not getting a bunch of stuff going on it's tough now i had the luck and the blessing of being also like what they call triple threat so i was writing for other people i had my own band with a record dylan warner brothers at the time called American Bang.

I also was producing a little bit of stuff. So there's many irons on the fire there as far as business speaking. And I try to look at it still that way. I mean, there's a lot of busy cats in Nashville. But I would say right now with the Cadillac 3, all the touring, the production work, I'm producing Kip Moore's new record. I just did Sam Williams' record and a bunch of stuff like that. And then also the writing every day. It gets pretty, it's pretty crazy. But if one thing's not doing as well, you got something to follow on the other side.

We couldn't tour. Bruce Buffer. What's up, Bruce? Hi, how are you? Everything good? Everything's great, man. And I love the t-shirt. Where did It's Time come from? Let's just from? I want to know where that came from.

When I started in the UFC announcing and I've been managing my brother, Michael Buffer, you know, the legendary greatest announcer of all time, let's get ready to rumble. We met late in life. When we did, I owned two companies. I had my first company when I was 19. I've been an entrepreneur ever since. I've owned a variety of companies, couple failures here and there, but most all successes, you know, I'm proud to say. When I met him, knowing that he was the announcer, he was and everything else, we eventually, I sold two companies,

I became his manager, managing his career and everything. I wanted to announce back then, we agreed I wouldn't do boxing and I said something would come along and boom, this is a very short version. And boom, the UFC came along and I worked my way into the UFC, but I never wanted to be Frank Sinatra Jr.

I never wanted to be, no respect to Frank Sinatra Jr., but I wanted to create my own style. I wanted to grow with the UFC to help market the brand, being the marketing and branding person they am first and foremost before I do anything else. And I told him, I said, I need to grow with you as the announcer, but I didn't think I needed a catchphrase. I'm not catchphrase driven. I was more like, it's not whatase. I'm not catchphrase driven. I was more like, it's not what I say, it's how I say it. So it wasn't until about seven years later that his time came about. Everybody always was going, let's get ready. Let's do this. They all wanted to be Michael. I just didn't want to come across like that. I told myself if within three years,

I could build my own identity, my own style. I would continue. If not, I would quit because I just didn't want to be that way. So every day I wake up and I was kidding before, but I'm serious. I look in the mirror and go, it's time. It's time to have the best day that I can possibly have. So I used to open the show saying it's time to begin the ultimate fighting championship. And then Dana White and the Fertittas brought it, bought the show. Dana and I met, he said, I don't want you doing that at the front anymore, top of the show. And I said, fine. But then I got down to the main event and I realized, Hey, everybody's sitting here for five hours. They watching the show, the main events about to start. Um, the fighters have been training six to eight weeks with its biggest moment in their lives.

This is definitely, it's time. This is, this is, it's time. This is when it's going to happen. And I started incorporating it in and gradually over time, it developed to the style that I do it now, whether I'm jumping or doing whatever. I never know physically what I'm going to do until I do it because I never rehearse. Never. I feel the energy of the crowd and I just let it fly. But when I was in Brazil and 20,000 Portuguese-speaking people said, it's time with me, I knew right then it hit. And that's when I started building it up. I knew right then it hit.

And that's when I started building it up. And then eventually over the last 15 plus years since then, I've developed into products and many things happening worldwide. And now as time has taken on a very individual branding of itself, I plan on reaching a billion dollars in sales with its time, whether it's sales of other, not in my pocket, sales of other companies, everything, as I achieved over half billions of dollars in sales with Let's Get Ready to Rumble.

But I love my brother, but I'm a competitor, and I'm going to come in first. The UFC has had this meteoric rise in the last 10 plus years, but like, did you see that coming? I knew from the very first day I got involved, it was going to be the biggest thing in fighting sports. You know, when you're in business, you need to be able to hopefully recognize the brand, recognize the future. I always think three steps ahead in life, like chess. I'd apply that to every aspect of business and any business I've owned or been involved in. Because to me, all business is the same. It's just the product that's different. But you've got to recognize what has the chance to be the big hit. I knew that was going to be with Let's Get Ready to Rumble. I got contacted by another company called Party Poker back when poker was not even as popular as

today, who wanted me to be part of it. One of the things I regret, I didn't grab that opportunity back then because I realized online poker was going to explode. And I'm a big part of poker myself in my private life. But when the UFC came on, yes, it was raw. It was a spectacle. It needed refinement. But I decided to stick with it, make the short money back then that I made, lose money going on trips. Everything I could do, realizing that if I stuck with this, because consistency is a key in business, that I knew it would all pay off. And I have a simple theory, and that's whenever I do business of any kind, I have a three-foot theory. Everybody around me be happy, healthy, and prosperous. And, you know, my goal is to help everybody around me get there because then it all comes back to me. What you're talking about is what life is all about these

experiences. And I always tell people when I do my branding and marketing, you know, motivational speeches or whatever, one key thing in business is find out what you're passionate about. And if you can learn how to monetize it, you're not really working, you're living a lifestyle. And that's, and my, I call my life by design. It's just like my new company, millions.co where we're branding athletes and everything. This is my millions.co t-shirt. It's buff life with capital B, which means B it's real simple. Be, be who you are, be the best you can be. As someone that doesn't even eat sweets really that often, if there's a damn cookie on the table, and especially this kind of cookie I'm getting in, it's Sawyer Hemsley, co-founder of Crumble Cookies.

What's up, brother? What's up, man? Happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. Hey, man. No, it's all good. I'm glad you could join us, man. I want to get into your story and, you know, all the ice right here. No setup, no anything. Why do those cookies taste so damn good? A bunch of love we put in there and lots of sugar. No, I'm just kidding. Honestly, we go through a rigorous process to make these cookies awesome and we get a lot of customer

feedback and we don't put them on the menu until they're perfect so sawyer talk to me i know you weren't we talked pre-episode i read a lot about your story not originally a chef a cookie master or whatever but let's talk about a little bit of that professional journey and what led you to Crumble. Yeah. So honestly, Crumble started out as a side hustle. Never anticipated ever being a career. I was in my last year at college up at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Very rural community compared to the rest of the nation and just needed something to do on the side. You know, I was studying 15 credits, busy college student, and I was researching things that I could do. And I saw that there were bakeries and cookie concepts out there. But it was at the height of when DoorDash and Grubhub and the delivery services were coming out. DoorDash and Grubhub and the delivery services were coming out. And so I connected with my cousin, Jason, and I said, we should totally deliver warm cookies to people's doorsteps. And that was the main focus. Like, aside from culinary and knowing all about food science and all that, we just said, let's just make grandma's mom's recipe and deliver it by using technology so people could stay at home in their pajamas or for girls night or date night, whatever. The convenience was there, less mess.

And you get warm cookies just as you would making them yourself. Was it chocolate chip cookies? It has to be right. That's where it all starts, right? Absolutely. Family recipe. We actually mixed and blended, you know, my grandma's, some of Jason's, my cousin's family side, and we just tested. We just tried different brands of chocolate chips, of sugar, of flour techniques. And again, we didn't know what we were doing in those early days. So we just networked and connected with other food professionals. We watched YouTube, read books, read cookbooks, you name it. We just were hungry to be that entrepreneur

and to make something successful, and then we just went for it. From the get-go, the marketing impressed me with you guys. I actually admired you from afar with the marketing. Before I even tried your cookies, I was like, okay, this is a company that knows what they're doing. And then I had the cookies, and I was like, holy shit, this is all coming together while they're both working so well. So talk to me about the brand. So my background is in branding, advertising. My cousin's background is in technology and paid ads, things like that. So together, I think,

first of all, we have an amazing partnership where our skills helped each other. How the marketing started is it all came down to the packaging and the experience of what our product was placed in. And that was our pink boxes, which you referred to just in the short time that we've been talking. And that's memorable. It's something that's energized. You can connect with that. It's a soft color and it attracts our target audience, which is our soccer moms, right? And so naturally they were pulled to our packaging. And from there, we just knew we had to capitalize on Instagram because TikTok wasn't a thing back then. We were really engaged on Instagram. We would run paid ads on Facebook and we would try our best to respond

and answer every single message or comment on these two platforms. And it just really helped to our advantage to the point where people were just tagging their friends and doing the marketing for us organically. And so that's really how the marketing started. And then now with time, as we've built out our team, we put a lot of paid ads into TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter. But again, organic for us has been huge. It's been crazy because people love the product. And when you love a product so much, you want to organically promote that to your inner circle. What's been the biggest pain points or learning, you know, as you've gone on this journey you know you're a

young guy but you've been successful you had a great idea great execution but talk about you know that entrepreneurial journey you know maybe the uh not the dark side but the learning side you know like it's everybody kind of gets understand it isn't all perfect all the time right oh it's not like building the brand is not kicks and giggles. It's hard. It's lonely. There's a lot of days that you're just working your guts out and you're making it work and you have a lot of people counting on you. You have to make it work, right? Something that's been really tricky is I've been young and so it's hard to earn respect in an industry where people are older than I am. And so it's important for me to be knowledgeable and be educated on the product. I'm not afraid to get in there and work the kitchen and know every aspect

of the concept because I need to be able to speak towards that. And so just being young in the industry and being a leader there, that's a hardship. Second thing is having so many locations and youthful staff and employees consistency is key with the ex all pro sean merriman what's up brother what's up my man how you doing it's good man the acronyms could go on and on now we got life insurance i know we're going to get into it we got lights out uh podcast we got lights out apparel fitness and we got some damn kick-ass UFC and fighting and all that shit, man. You got it going on, brother. Talk about the football background, and then we'll get into some business.

I committed to University of Maryland as a junior. And the reason why is because I was home. I didn't want to leave. My mom leave, my high school coaches, friends. I wanted everybody to come and watch me play. So I went to University of Maryland. Had a great career there, but ended up leaving early.

When I found out that I was going to go somewhere in the top 10, top 15 of the first round of draft, I was like, this type of shit doesn't happen. You want to take advantage of it. And then the rest is history. I got out and got that nickname, Lights Out,

my sophomore year in high school. I got out and got that nickname Lights Out my sophomore year in high school. I knocked out four players in one game in high school, and I ended up getting that nickname Lights Out, and I carried that all the way through. Getting away from the game, the highs of that, the emotional highs and everything, how hard was that transition? That first year is beyond tough. I'll tell anybody that is about to retire, and I talk to guys all the time, right? They say they got a year, two years left, maybe three. I say, whatever you want to do when you're done, start doing it now. And that way, when you're done, you do it right away. Because if you have downtime, you're going to struggle.

We transitioned, you were ready, you teed it up. You had NFL network. You've got the apparel company lights out, um, nature or nurture. Like were you just a natural born entrepreneur waiting to come out of the bottle or like, did you absorb and learn from others? No, I was just, I was natural, man. I've always mean when I was a kid, I was selling, you know, five six nintendo games to get the one best one right and i'll go out and wash cars you know during the summers cut grass shovel snow rake leaves and i would take it and use all the money for what i wanted to you know whether i wanted to go buy a new uh mouthpiece or football equipment or cleats. I was always hustling in a way. And I think that this entrepreneur word has kind of become more recent, but you look back on everything now,

even to the point of branding. You did, you created the brand. I mean, you talked about for the Mohawk and the look and the feel and like you became, I mean, character, so to speak, but the persona of a brand or a machine. I mean, like you were that. So as you said, right, you had what I did on the football field is creating this character, this persona, all these things. But in the hindsight of it, I was just kind of the launching pad to everything with the brand.

I've always felt that Lights Out was bigger than anything I could do on a football field. And that's why when I bought the name and rights to Trademarks I bought in 2006, I bought it for, you know, numerous things. Clothing, workout stuff, and equipment, marketing and advertisement, energy drinks. This is

something I acquired from another company at the age of 21 years old. And so I don't even know if Trademarking was even that big, and people talked about it old. And so I don't even know if trademarking was even that big and if people talked about it enough. And I just took those extra steps to know that this brand was going to be a lot bigger than I ever could be. Because athletes are some of the most disciplined, hardworking.

Like, I mean, think about it. My whole life has been structured, right, since I was 10 years old. I was told what time to eat, told what time to wake up, told what time to watch film and practice and go to what time I had to go to sleep to be ready for practice the next day. My whole life is structured. And so what do you need out here to be successful? Two things, discipline and structure. If you have those, you got a good chance to be successful at anything because that's what a lot of people lack. A lot of people lack just being disciplined and having structure in their life, which is one

of the only things that I know at this point. And so my goal is to get to a thousand plus agents and help people make as much money as they possibly can. We're talking billions today, my friends, not millions, billions, billions, billions, billions upon billions with Howie P. Howard Payne's serial entrepreneur and billion dollar brand maker. What's up, brother? What's up? What's up? Hey, thanks for having me. I think your show is amazing and I appreciate you having me on. Hey, I appreciate that. Let's talk your journey, man. I know you got a great story, kind of your entrepreneurial journey, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows.

Let's start it, brother. I came from a middle class family. My mom was an entrepreneur. She was into clothing and fashion. So she had jewelry stores. So she was always taking me to work. And I always saw how she controlled her own destiny and how her being an entrepreneur and very motivational, she had the freedom to buy what she want and do what she want.

And for me, that really, it hit me deep inside. I come from a pretty much entrepreneurial family. My grandparents came here as immigrants, started a trucking company. I was loading tractor trailers when I was eight, nine, 10. I liked the fact of getting paid. I liked that I could get that cash and do something with it. And I realized at a very young age that financial freedom was really important. I programmed myself at a young age that I really wanted to be successful. I wanted to be tough, the martial arts, and I wanted to be built.

And I wasn't the tallest guy so i had to have all the other components my journey as a young young kid i was uh shoveling driveways snowblowing business cleaning windows anything i could do to make an extra buck my success really you know it helped me in my in my world because I talked to everybody in every store and every walks of life because that's, for me, that gives me life to be able to communicate with everybody, no matter what level you are. Everyone puts so much pressure on themselves to be successful or to find success or to find happiness. And I think the most important thing is to find what you're passionate about. What do

you love to do? And really focus in on that. Everyone's trying to do a million things and to find and seek happiness. And as I dove deeper into my experiences, I came up with the Howie method. Five easy things, everybody. This is five easy tips you could do to change your life forever. The H, I leave my life in the cornerstone of health. Health is wealth. If you have health, you have everything. It helps your energy levels. It helps you think better. It helps you just feel better and you're feeling energized and you can perform better, do everything in your life better by having health in your life as number one. O, what is O? O is originality. I say, be you, be real, be proud. Be that one person, you look in the mirror and learn how to be happy with that guy because that's who you are. How can you make that the

best person, the best version that you are? Because this is going to be your most success. I was never the smartest kid. I was never the biggest kid. I was never the best looking kid, although I look okay. Never a great athlete. I was never great at anything. You know, when I say to myself this, and I tell everybody this out there, is I could beat guys all day long that are smarter than me, stronger than me, tougher than me. I can beat them all day long in a howie, in my way, in the way I'm confident about myself. And I think this is the best thing that I can offer anybody is you're so special and you're so individual that you have such talents. You just have to tap into them. So originality is so important. Be you, be real, be proud.

The W is work. You've got to put the work in. So hard work, you can't hack hard work. You can do things smarter, but time is something I put in long and hard into the projects that I've gone into. Most not successful, one that took me to the stratosphere. Hard work is everything. The I, innovation. It's easy to be a copycat in life, but can you innovate? Can you do something different? Can you serve the world differently, solve problems in a different way? So I, innovation, got to innovate. And the E, E is when we're talking about your little drink, energy. Got to energize yourself daily. You know, what energizes you? I have certain songs I listen to energize me. I have certain, you know, YouTube videos. There's some motivational ones. I picked

a few that really get me amped up. And you see a lot of professional athletes, world-class Olympians, that they listen to certain things before they perform because it heightens your level of alertness and your energy level to a new level. So energy is a big part. Going out there, my best foot forward every day, energized and enthusiastic. What kind of legacy are we trying to leave? Especially when I consider my son and that motivates me to want to put work out just in case something happens. At least he'll have something to look back on and be able to kind of figure out who his dad was. You like to think that it's kind of like

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Use them where Tom Petty did so much with the band, wrote great songs for other people. It's kind of like the life that people like me try to strive for. On a family level and then on a

professional career level, you know, those guys pretty much done everything you can do. Here's the simple thing. Success breeds competition and competition breeds success. You want other people to be successful, but the UFC is the rocket ship. The flames are coming and everybody's following their path. Right. And I'm very lucky again to have a first class seat on that rocket ship. Don't forget where you came from and what got you there. Again, never anticipated to make this a franchise model, but a lot of friends and family wanted to be involved because they saw the early success and they saw how much energy was behind, you know, the cookies. And so my parents actually approached us and said, can we open a store? Can we be involved? And we said, sure, why don't you open your own store?

And so we went through the legal paperwork, set it up as a franchise. And then it started out as my parents, you know, my college roommate, my sister, and then word of mouth just started to spread across Utah and the surrounding states and now the nation. And we've never actively sold a franchise. Everyone's always come to us to say, we want to be involved in going to open a store Utah and the surrounding states and now the nation, and we've never actively sold a franchise, everyone's always come to us to say, we want to be involved. We want to open a store and own a business. And that's kind of how it unfolded there. At this point, my goal is to get to a thousand plus agents and help people make as much money as they possibly can. It's everything at every piece, at every level, because you know what? I know that you can't leave a lot in other people's hands if you really want to control your outcome of success.

And I hear this too many times with everybody. They think they can hire everybody to help them be successful when in fact it's you going to be curious and learn what other people did before and where their failures were and how that can help you, you know, be better, do more and be more successful. You know where to find me. I'm at Ryan Offord on all the platforms. Hit me up on TikTok. I'm blowing up over there. We're at theradcast.com. We'll see you next time. To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account,

the.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.