Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Resilience, Reputation, and Real Lessons in Entrepreneurship with Anik Singal

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Entrepreneurship isn’t just about growth — it’s about what holds when everything is tested. In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford speaks with entrepreneur and author Anik Singal about one of the most challenging periods of his career: navigating an extended FTC investigation that forced him to shut down operations just weeks before a major company acquisition. Anik walks through: What an FTC investigation is really like Why compliance and substantiation are critical at scale The dangers of building fast without the right guardrails How reputation and brand can protect you in the worst moments Turning professional setbacks into purpose and clarity This conversation is a powerful reminder that success isn’t defined by how fast you grow — but by how well you’re prepared when things go wrong. Host & Guest Info Ryan Alford Host, Right About Now Website: https://ryanisright.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford Anik Singal Entrepreneur & Author Website: https://dontsaythat.com Compliance Software: https://complylly.com

All generations, millennial and below, will much rather pay more money to buy the same product that they actively know they can buy for cheaper, but they'll pay more money because of the connection they feel to the brand because of how much they believe in the brand and what the brand stands for, that message. The word I'm coming out here is community. It's brand building. And this is not something traditional direct marketers are aware of or even no. I could not be here in front of you today if it wasn't for the brand I built. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes.

You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Right About Now. It's always I get things right. Speed is time and money. You got to go fast. That's why we're all about now.

I wouldn't call myself the chief compliance officer. I would probably not say that at all. But after reading this guy's story and after you hear it today, I might be complying a little more than I want. We got Onick. Sengong, what's up, Onick? Hey, man. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate you. I'm kind of a rule breaker. But I don't really want to deal with the FTC. Let's set the table for everyone, Onick, on who you are and how you made the wrong kind of history. Started doing online marketing when I was still in college. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't have any money.

And I turned to Google and I tried. in how to make money. And Google, thankfully, filled in online for me. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. What a concept. And I went through all of the different little envelopes, stuff in survey answering bullshit options, and found my way into a forum that talked about selling PDFs and selling information. Here's the thing. I was on a full scholarship and it was an amazing program. Every time a new semester came, my friends would spend three to five thousand dollars on textbooks. We pay for education. Since we're kids, the value of education is important. It made sense to me. I was like, huh, this looks like a legit opportunity. Get rid of the middle man, connect the

person who's actually doing with the person who wants to learn it, charge, commoditize education, 50 bucks, 100 bucks. This is amazing. Like, this makes sense to me. Problem was, I didn't know what the hell was doing. Didn't know how to build a website. Didn't know how to write. Didn't know how to do any of this crap. And so I'm on this forum. And I don't have any money. And back then, we didn't have all these podcasts and coaches and courses and YouTube. And I had to spend money to hire someone to help me. And I didn't have it. To piece it all together, 18 months struggled my ass off. Finally, something worked. It was SEO, affiliate marketing, then email, building and then course publishing. I made my way through it. And by the time I graduated,

I was on pace to do over a million dollars within four years. While I was in college, while I was working on part-time job. My first college football game I ever went to, homecoming after I graduated. So when I was in college, I did not go to frat parties. I did not go to college game. I was working hard, man. I was studying and I was doing my part-time job. When I graduated, I had offers from Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab to come investment bank in New York. I literally was living the dream that all my friends were dying for. And I said no to all the jobs because I wanted to do this. Built my business up. I've had near bankruptcies multiple times now, three times. That's the magic number. So I'm done. I've been tested. The magic number for a lot of billionaires is they've almost lost everything three times. So I am good, universe. Hear me out now. I'm done with this. I'm done with this. I've been up and down. I've traveled the world. I've spoken to Robbins, Grant Cardone, have partnered with and been business partners with Robert Giosaki, Bob Proctor, Les Brown,

Damon John from Shark Tank, wrote the forward to my last book, Escape. I've made a movie. I was, I was joking with you. I mean, I'm on IMDB. I made a freaking Bond spoof film of a crew of 120 people where I conducted stunts. I was actually going to do massive stunts, but I ended up having a problem and had to get surgery the week before. So it was either delay the entire shoot, which I didn't have the budget for, or cut out the stunts and do some really stupid shit and make it look like I'm doing stunts. But I've lived a really full life. I always joke and say, I'm 41, I feel like I've lived at least normal persons two or three lifetimes. Built my, I've done a couple hundred million dollars worth of sales online now and built my

business at its peak was going to do 40 million. And we were weeks away from selling. Due diligence was complete. And my dream was to sell a company by the time of 40. I was about to do that. I was 39. It was really hard, man. When I started 20 years ago, my hypothesis, thesis in life, I was so appalled by the idea

of someone having a job. It makes sense to me. Why would anyone do that? My thesis when I graduated college, when I hadn't really met life yet, was everybody should be an entrepreneur, everybody. And 20 years later, I stand before you and I'm saying 99.8% of the world should never be an entrepreneur. It's just not for everybody. But for me, it's the only path. I just can't see any other way. And so I love what I do. It comes with some really, really, really bad, really, really hard, trying tough times. But I take it all in strides. I like it. And today, I really feel like the don'ts and the do's is that. Like, look, when everything was going exactly as I should, building that company for 20 years was the hardest thing I've ever done. I tell people this analogy, imagine you've been training for the Olympics for 20 years. You get into that, you're running, you're in the race, you're ahead. You're about to win.

Everything you've dreamt of. Every broken bone, hard work, bruise, every morning you woke up at 4, every shameful thing that happened. I mean, embarrassing thing that happened, you're two steps away from crossing the finish line and you will be the gold medalist winner. your life's dreams will have come true, you trip. You fall, break your ankle. Not only do you not win that race, you can't race for another two, three years. And when you come back, the doctors are like, you're going to have to retrain this entire ankle. You're back to where you were 10, 15 years ago. Do you still want to win the Olympic medal or do want to give up on it now? And that's what happened with me. It was a hard reset in my life. I lost the acquisition. I lost everything. Done it all,

built it all, done crazy things. I've traveled the world. I've lived in other parts of the world. I'm an experienced-driven person, so I'll do stupid things just for the experience. I have zero regrets. People always ask me, what is it like to be sued by the FTC? I always tell people this. There was a period of my time in my life that I was in the ICU. I was in the ICU. I was in the ICU for 92 days. I was losing two pints of blood a day. So every day they had to infuse me with two pints of blood. I have a condition called Crohn's disease. It got out of control. My intestines were literally eroding. And I was flat on a hospital bed in the ICU. I almost got kicked out of a hospital because I refused to stop working in the ICU. I would get blackberries. iPhones didn't exist. I would get blackberries

snuck into the ICU by my team members. I did a product launch from inside the ICU when I was dying because I was like as long as I'm breathing, I don't give a shit. If I'm breathing, I'm fighting. There's no excuses. And that kept me alive. I'm in the ICU. I'm flat. What happened is if they even put my hospital bed up, if I was just sit up, my heart rate would spike to 180. They'd have to put me right back down. For three months, I was flat. Couldn't get out of bed, couldn't walk, never walk, nothing. I was in really bad shape. Three months later, they basically said, we don't have an option. We have to do a very, very large surgery on them. Ten hours minimum. And they told my family, 50-50 if he wakes up. Like, we just would not be surprised his body.

super weak. We don't know. I did obviously wake up and went through hell. I had to set up a makeshift hospital in my parents' basement. Took me two months of physical therapy just to be able to walk up the steps again. Because don't use it, you lose it. I lost my legs. Six months after that, had to have surgery again. A month after that surgery, I was back in the ICU for 30 days. Had to have a third surgery. That was a really hard year of my life. Being investigated by the FTC for 18 months was harder. And I say that looking you dead square in the eyes. I'm not trying to make stuff up. I took what is the hardest part of my life, the most tragic part of my life, the most painful part of my life. The part that of most people, everyone has something like this in their

life. Could have gone through a nasty divorce. You could have gone through lost something or someone or God, there's anything. And what we tend to do is we tend to compartmentalize it, build a membrane around it, put it away and say, I don't want to touch it. I don't want to see it, but it lives there. It's that little demon that sits there and it eats at you. You can't ignore or avoid it. So for me, it was like, I'm not. I'm front and centering this thing. I'm going to. to live it. I'm going to experience it. And what happened in that was it ended up becoming my mission. So I turned the most tragic thing in my life to now what looks like is will be the greatest victory of my life. Because I wasn't going to let it sit there for my entire life and be this

thing, this dirty thing that I don't talk about or I don't deal with. But I was going to instead turn it into the best thing that's ever happened to me. It's a little thing I want everyone to think about right now. There can walk away with something today right now. What is that little demon you've hidden away? What is that thing that aches you, hurts you, that triggers you? that you've put away, and how could it serve you rather than hurting you? Anyways, that's my monologue. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk today. Hey, guys, if you've ever built a website before,

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which has been huge for me when I'm trying to perfect the look of my website. We've also got built-in tools for selling, bookings, and marketing. Pretty much all the stuff you actually need once the site's live. If you're building anything right now, a side project, brand, business, whatever, Wix Harmony honestly makes it easier to get out of your own way and start making stuff happen. Go to Wix.com backslash Harmony. That's Wix.com backslash Harmony. Start your website today.

As being one of the top copywriters and information marketers ever, it's been an interesting 10 years in the space with selling information, coaching, all that stuff. What's changed? What's the same in that space? What you saw and what were some of your biggest successes in information marketing? We are due for a shakedown. It happens in every industry. It's not unique to us. And I've already lived through two of these.

The last shakedown happened between 2010 and 2012. Quite frankly, we're about a couple of years overdue. COVID came in and did some weird stuff. It changed the timelines. Otherwise, we would have had an industry correction already. Now, the shakedown, the way it works is too many people are teaching shit they shouldn't be. If you want to act as if for your own self to give yourself encouragement and to give yourself motivation, like, do what you want when it's just you. But if I find out that my math teacher is acting

as if they know math and they don't and they're teaching me math, like, we have a problem. I'll never forget. I walk up to my marketing 101 professor, sophomore year. He was older, so I kind of assumed that he must have worked as VP, CMO marketing for big companies and now he's retiring and he became a professor. Went up to him, I said, hey, what companies have you done marketing for? And he starts telling me a list of companies he's consulted. And I said, no, I was curious like, where have you work? Where have you led? And turns out he's a 35 year professor. He's never actually had a job in marketing. I didn't even come to class after that. Honestly, I was so turned off by the whole thing. There's a lot of that going on right now in the industry. And there was a lot of it going on back in 2008,

2009. When the economy takes a weird hitch, and I'm not here to say that the economy is going down because that seems to trigger half the people. Can we all agree on one thing? We're in a conflicted economy, which means half of the world's like, dude, we're in a shit show. The other half the world's like, this is, I've never seen anything better. Whether it's today, a year from now, five years from now, there's going to be a correction. Has to be. That market's going to go down. It has to.

It's actually healthy. It better correct. Otherwise, we're in for really big problem later. So given that fact, we know we're going to go through this. We might be in it now. We're going to go through it soon. Now what happens? The demand pulls back.

The amount of money people are spending on stuff pulls back. But you've got an oversupply of coaches and trainers and educators because they sprang up during all the pandemic time. Generally, they spring up. Now we got worldwide. India, it's like growing like weeds. In Asia, coaches and course sellers. So we've got more options, more people. And it's driving prices down. It's just weird with what's happening, though, with the increase in demand, cost of advertising is going up. Pricing is coming down. Demand is pulling back

from the consumers. It's creating a complete constraint. Businesses are going to fall apart. And so it's a shakedown. What happens now is all the people that really aren't here to be here that know what the hell they're doing, that aren't doing this out of a great place, a passion. People always tell me, I'm like, I haven't made shit from this, guys. This whole mission, I am in the hole by over a million, maybe $1.5 million. That's right. I know I'm not making that up. I can substantiate this.

I'm not in the business of making crap up. I already got sued for that crap. It's my passion that drives this. I want the message out. And I firmly believe that it'll come around. And I'm the right person to teach us. I got some other marketers right now that are trying to come and teach FTC stuff. And I just sit there, pat them on the head and say, this is so stupid.

You can't. You don't have the story. You don't have the experience. You don't have the connections. You don't have the knowledge. So I'm seeing a lot of that in the space, and I saw it before, and it cleaned itself out, and it's going to happen again. As far as what's working, there's one big difference between what worked 10, 15 years ago and today. One big difference in the infospace.

And that is how people convert. 10 15 years ago, good copy, sexy copy, video sales page was enough. People came and read it. Today, it's kind of irrelevant. We're in a very communal consumer base now, especially with the younger audiences growing up. It's been proven. Studies have actually proven that all generations, millennial and below, will much rather pay more money to buy the same product that they actively know they can buy for cheaper, but they'll pay more money because of the connection they feel to the brand, because of how much they believe in the brand and what the brand stands for, that message. The word I'm coming out here is community.

It's brand building. And this is not something traditional direct marketers are aware of or even no. I could not be here in front of you today if it wasn't for the brand I built. Always focused on my brand. It cost me millions. I made a lot less money. But I stand before you today in the same industry, tall, proud, chin up, and nobody in the industry persecuted me for what happened with the FTC.

Otherwise, for a lot of people, that's a kill shot. They're done. They disappear. I stand in front of it all. Why? Because my reputation spoke for itself. I had taken time to build the brand. If you're doing information marketing, you're a coach, whatever.

First and foremost, change your windows. You can't focus anymore on converting same day next day. You've got to do 30, 60, 90-day windows. You've got to do content marketing. You have to win people over with your substance. And that's where the shakedown is going to happen. Because the people that are acting as if have no substance, the market's going to weed you out.

They're going to see right through it. For an information marketer, what are they doing between the time that they're pitching you? How are they serving the community? What is the information? And most people are just not willing to put that time in. They're not fond to every single chat in their Facebook community. They're not going to put out podcasts like you do.

This isn't easy. People think we just spring up. We had to connect. We had to schedule. You went through a hurricane. You got a studio. You've got team members. You had to take time away from your schedule. You barely got a chance to eat lunch. That kind of dedication, Ryan, is what it takes today. You didn't need that 10, 15 years ago. You just glide through. As we close out here, On it, talk about how you've turned into a positive and all the stuff you're up to. We are a culmination and a collective of all of our experiences, not just the good ones. And the things that hurt and the bad ones, not one person has won the Olympic gold medal without losing a shitload of races, bruises, broken bones, pain, crying, sacrifices, and tough times. No one. You want to be great?

You got to deal with what the greats deal with. What can you do? How can you turn your greatest tragedy into your greatest victory? For me, I've turned it into my message. I'm out there on every day trying to do a podcast, talk to people about it, or wrote a book about it. We built an academy that people are loving where we train and teach people about it. I'm speaking on stages. I'm traveling around.

And we built an AI powered software that I've invested almost a million dollars building that is now being prospected by some of the biggest companies in the country because it does something that nobody else does. God forbid that software takes off could possibly be worth hundreds of millions of dollars one day. That's the kind of opportunity that sits in the tragedy that you obviously survived. And in surviving that, what did you learn and what did you pick up that could help others? What would you have wished existed for you that could have helped you avoid that tragedy? And you've got yourself a potentially huge idea that allows you to be of true service.

That's my positive message. If you want the book, don't say that.com. And if you want to check out our software, just because you're curious, we have a demo and you can use it for free. We have a 5,000 word free limit. Just go to complyly, C-O-M-P-L-I-L-Y.com. And when you go to Don't Say That, you'll see a podcast. We're all over social media as stuff.

I was the marketing guy. I was the email marketing guy. And believe me, now there isn't a single day that I'm not tagged at least six or seven or eight times on Facebook about compliance-related matters. You can pivot yourself and your brand very quickly if the message is loud enough. With all the AI, all the technology, all these conveniences and seemingly technical things, the best things come down to being human. And that's what you are, brother. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, guys, you know where to find us, Ryanisright.com. That's not just hyperbole. It's not just a claim.

It can be proven most of the time. You'll out of all the highlight clips. You'll find links, tonic stuff and go check out don't say that we appreciate you for making us number one and we can claim it we'll see you next time all right about now this has been right about now with ryan alford a radcast network production visit ryanisright dot com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening