Have you ever been backed into a corner with nowhere to go?
Sometimes life doesn’t go as planned. You pursue your passion, only to be met with endless obstacles and no hope of success.
In times like those, you need to improvise, adapt, and pivot in order to thrive.
After studying music production, Ryan Bartlett slipped into a “starving musician” lifestyle, playing piano at restaurants 7 days a week to feed himself.
After 2 years, he found himself flat broke and searching for a different career. He had hit rock bottom with nowhere to go but up, so he took a job at an SEO agency.
Ryan quickly realized that the true value in helping a business grow was having the ability to drive traffic directly to their website. He became immersed in the industry of SEO, internet marketing, and PPC.
After 2 years on the grind, he left his job to start his very own company – SEO Direct. His mission: To invest genuine care into every business he worked with. The foundation of SEO Direct was (and still is) Trust, Transparency and Value. A decade later SEO Direct is now one of the most reputable digital marketing agencies in LA.
In late 2019 he started another venture with his two partners: True Classic. A men’s apparel company that focused on producing high quality, fitted t-shirts at a reasonable price. In 2020, they scaled the company 3000% and went from doing 673 orders/month to over 60k orders/month with a mission to build tiny homes for homeless veterans.
In this episode of the Rock Your Money, Rock Your Life, Ryan and I discuss how he went from a starving musician to the CEO of an 8-figure business, the struggles he faces as a full time entrepreneur, and why he formed a passion to help get veterans off the streets and into homes.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
- How Ryan scaled his business over 3000%
- The importance of knowing where your money comes from in your business
- How tough love can be a game changer for children
- And much more!
“The most valuable asset we have is time.”
Topics Covered:
00:00 – Intro to Ryan
03:03 – A serial entrepreneur
06:09 – Define a timeline
08:03 – Cash flowing assets
09:15 – How many players do you have on your team?
15:01 – What are you sacrificing?
17:00 – Lessons from an entrepreneur
21:00 – You can’t do it all
23:20 – Every lesson adds up
26:27 – Scattered home approach for veterans
31:30 – Crush it!
36:30 – Tough love and starting young
40:00 – True Classic T’s
Key Takeaways
“A very expensive lesson I’ve learned is attribution, which is being able to identify exactly where the source of your revenue is coming from and how you exactly quantify that.” – Ryan Bartlett
Connect with Ryan Bartlett:
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