MFM x Trends - The Fundamentals of a ~$60m Newsletter Exit With Ryan Begelman

alright you guys are gonna love it's another special episode so here's the deal on this episode we have this guy named ryan bi man i met ryan in our trends group and he's so fascinating that we had to have him on to do a special episode and we sean and i had him on as normal my million guest but this one's a a special issue for trends and let me tell you a little bit of the background about this guy so fascinating i think he's thirty six years old and he's done so much so ryan had this company called biz media which was a newsletter business that it was like the hustle like my company but for real estate and he grew it and eventually sold it for sixty million dollars in cash and at the time of the sale it was doing like twenty million in revenue seven million in profit and he did it bootstrap without taking any funding and during this process he started this thing called summit series and you gotta you guys got google summit series to kinda get the full picture it's so weird to explain but and and this is gonna sound derogatory but it's not but it's kinda like a ted talk but for like techie and entrepreneurial folks and rich people and they originally started up by hosting these events where it was kind of expensive like two three four or five thousand dollars but they would get like kendrick lamar to come they would get asap rocky they would get reid hoffman the founder of linkedin and re hastings the founder of netflix and all these amazing people they had like a gore bill clinton russell simmons richard branson like these worldly people john johnny legend it it's crazy and it and it started as a festival and eventually it was like a like a like an annual conference then they even hosted it one time on a cruise ship and like the founders of uber and dropbox and facebook go and eventually ryan had the idea of thinking like okay this conference is cool but how do we keep this party going how do we create community of folks like this year round and so he somehow convinced all these people to pre buy land and he collected fifty million dollars and went out and bought a mountain in which he turned into a the thing called powder mountain it was a ski mountain it's one of the largest ski mountains in the country privately held ski mountains of the country i believe and it's crazy fascinating i went out and visited it and it was so cool so interesting it's like he was twenty seven twenty six i i believe when he did this they built all the roads all the plumbing they did everything and it's just crazy fascinating than what they did and ryan's whole deal is that he's very calm he's very collective collective but he's he's he's definitely alpha like anal re attentive and i love that about him but he's so calm about it and so in this episode what we talked about was how ryan operationalize his business both summit series powder mountain and business now and he walks through the steps that he took like for example when he would hire people he like would have them go through this crazy process of hiring to prove that they had the attributes that he was looking for and it's incredibly fascinating and he would document the whole process and at the company the employees had a handbook that like documented everything at the business and it's really hard to do that but it's so important to be able to sub people in and find talented people and get them onboard really quickly and so in this episode we walk through ryan's tips for operational his business and it's just really fascinating so i hope you enjoy it you get the first fifteen minutes for free if you want the whole thing go to trends dot c and you will be able to listen to the whole episode along with all the other episodes that we've done like this people are loving it so we're gonna keep doing these and if you sign up it so it cost a dollar so you could pay a dollar and if you don't like it you can just cancel within fourteen days and you just lost a buck but folks have been loving these and if you sign up what you'll get is the trans weekly email where we dive deep and we do analysis on all the cool businesses that we're discovering and talking about but you also get access to the community so this is actually where i met ryan this is i met a lot of big name people so check it out go to trends dot c and sign up and you'll see this podcast and all the other stuff and we hope to see you in the group okay so this podcast or as of now the my first million listeners are listening so half a million people a month are hearing this right now the rest of this they're gonna get this little preview and then the rest of this is just gonna be for the trends people and we're actually gonna send this out to our tens of thousands of ten trend subscribers and then our million plus email subscribers a blog post and i'm gonna write about this so you're wearing you're gonna get some push sam i'm gonna send this to my twenty followers and my mom that's good as sound i'm gonna get you bush i'm gonna get you the bump the the beagle mint bump the beagle bump yeah right the beagle mint bump okay so you came prepared with a list of things that you wanted to talk about right one well one major topic yeah i thought we should talk about four ways that people can be a better ceo how to be a high performance and not just ceo but frankly if you're running your own one person show if you're running you know a department then you know this is this is for people who are who are you know getting shit done and managing other people and relating to other people and this is better than buying a company i think so well this this applies regardless so this is not necessarily about building in company this is about how to run a company once you have a company or once you're in a division of a company alright well let's do a little background and let me let me let me start here because i built the hustle because i was inspired by a bunch of stuff one of those things that i was inspired by was i learned about biz media and biz media was a or still is a it's was like a it was a newsletter business that had a thriving trade show business or conference business and you c founded it with the with the two other founders who's a another guy named mark and his son elliot and then after you work there for six or seven years you sold it for roughly sixty million dollars and while doing all this you c founded this thing called summit series which was a festival conference type of setup that had bill clinton russell simmons travis county just like the world leaders and then eventually you convinced a lot of those folks to give you a little bit of money and you pre bought or pre sold land and you use that fifty million dollars to buy a mountain now where you are in your stage in your stage in your career you are looking for a new project but the whole thing that you've done has all been because you're kind of like an operational powerhouse that's my long but short summary of what of your careers that correct yeah that that's roughly correct and yeah i consider myself like an operator first so like i'm good at optimizing and managing and leading companies probably better you're probably better than me i and you're definitely better than me at starting the everything yeah in your friend and you helped me and we met because someone introduced us and then i eventually went your house and now we've become good friends in a very short amount of time and i've already like beat you head with a million questions on operating and that's why you are here today because to to talk to the listeners about operating because even when you sold the company you like walked me through some of the the details of how happened and i'm like oh my god like you plan this whole thing and this was like the most process driven thing i've ever seen and i wanna learn a little bit about that yeah yeah yeah i i was obsessive about process systems culture and how to get the most out of the organization for sure and and doing that profit and in a way that were we where we could con own and control you know all the equity or most deputy equity all the equity with our team instead of raising outside capital and and lead a good life and be what i would call like a holistic entrepreneur like an entrepreneur who you know wants the work hard wants to create cool things but also is trying to self actual and enjoy the ride and the last thing i'm gonna add before i let you talk is that you're kinda like a weirdo and that is a compliment in that you're like this you worked at carl aisle so a pretty cut throat like alpha driven pe firm but then and then you like operate your businesses like by the like very tight like in a good way like you know it's it's a well oiled machine but then you're also into like the fun woo woo spiritual stuff that you call mental fitness so you're kinda interesting person yeah i think i think once i realized that i could control my thoughts instead of that my thoughts controlling me and i could go from being an metallic robot who's just in reaction mode all day to actually choosing how i react to stimuli and being more in the moment and then i was like man i gotta get better at this this is so freaking rewarding it was like when you discover that you know going for a run gives you like endo it makes you feel good it breaks down things and like helps you be productive was it was that for of the mind so so before we get into this you're gonna talk about you have the this this little list to call that's probably gonna be great but can you brag about yourself like how big was biz now summit can you like give some sense so people understand where your perspectives coming from and what you were dealing with and pull you wise maybe revenue wise i don't know how like i kinda wanna give you a platform to brag a little thanks daryl i'll try to do my best i'll channel my mother so i yeah i i look i worked at the one of the world's biggest private equity firms like carl i actually bought into biz now and and grew it from a small like four or five person company to an eighty person seven million dollar profitable business seven million in profit profit not revenue and distributing money to our partnership and never raised you know bootstrap no outside capital whatsoever and sold that company like you said for a bunch of money to a private equity firm the headline the headline is fifty million dollars you don't have to confirm that but that's what the headline says yeah and then at the same exact time like literally in the same week that i started doing that we c founded summit which became also like a twenty million dollar revenue business with you know thousands of customers and and as you mentioned we bought powder mountain which is the largest ski resort by acreage ten thousand acres of ski train in utah with seven lifts and hundreds of employees in the winter and a development team and and we've sold you know i think like a hundred and sixty million dollars with the real estate of the project we also built a thirty million dollar venture fund called summit action started a nonprofit that's been in existence now for like seven years and and done a lot of real like probably don't like you know twenty some odd real estate investments so how old are you thirty six i just turned thirty eight thirty eight so you've done a lot yeah and i think the thing i'm proud of in terms of like the businesses is that we operated with no outside capital and bootstrap and like we had to learn how to be really optimal at running everything like it we we there wasn't like a lot of room for you know low performance okay well let's get into it what's so like ryan is like very type a he's calm but he's type a and we planned this podcast a week ago and he brought me this list and it's always the best it's exhausting because he sweats the details so much but i know for a fact he's come very prepared for this alright so i thought we can start with hiring and onboarding because they that's obviously fundamental to every business that grows beyond one person and does that sound good yeah so i mean one of my big epiphany early on was that you know i was doing all the hiring myself at biz and at summit and and quickly i realized i should replace myself in that role and hire a full time recruiter internally dude do you have one of these yet mh we're we're interviewing her right now for interviewing core or the couple big candidates that we like i'm always amazed by how large companies get before they hire recruiter because with the recruiter you're just constantly seeing more candidates you're gonna get better people into your company the people make a huge difference and on top of it when you have a pipeline of new fresh talent coming your company constantly it put some pressure on everyone else who's already inside the company to level up because you know of course they could get replaced by like the new talent that's coming up the you know through the ranks so it's super helpful to to have a recruiter and you know initially i you can do this yourself of course if you're a small company and i i'm really wary of executive recruiters like outside recruiters i and i have had success with them but a lot of times they just are shuffling people from another company to your company they'll come back to you and steal the people they put in your company to move them to the next company and they just don't care they don't know your values and they're just like their hustle generally as mediocre care so i i'm not saying never but i mostly use internal recruiting and how how big were you when you got one at biz now we were like probably twenty employees when i hired the guy who i hired to do recruiting ended up being the ceo of the company and stole the ceo of the company and so then he this guy will i think his name's will right yeah will frank you said he was like a new but like he was a young kid with zero experience is that right yeah i hired him out of college i literally went to his college and like met him there where he was a call where he was a party promoter which is one of the things i filter for which i'll talk about i love hiring people who are you know drug dealers book ease you know people who have hustle people who are i love party promoter you know i don't know what they're doing now during covid but if you filter for high intelligence and you filter for and the one way to filter for a high intelligence is just look at people who at top thirty universities they've already done the job for you people who have high intelligence often just learn quicker i i discovered but there's a lot of people who have high intelligence in our lazy and don't have hustle or not you know creative in terms of being invent so i also look for you know a background signals that suggest that they might have a lot of hustle per your brand and the other thing i'm looking for too is is you know one one thought i wanted to share too is like it's it's best to test and not rely on just talking to them in like traditional behavioral interviews link just interviewing somebody people are good salespeople people that often come off really good in an interview so you really need to test them and in order to come up with tests you can just slow down your processes like think about how you do what you do well and whatever you're hiring for and one way to do that of course is to do it yourself first master it and then figure out what does a test like could give someone that would help me understand if they can replicate processes the kinds of things i do and if if anything do it better than may and then give them those tests and be constant we we were at biz we were constantly iterate iterating so like for accounting we gave people like an excel test with like twenty different things that they have to label and move and shuffle around formulas to calculate we also gave them a written test with like you know problems to solve in questions about you know the balance sheet and things of that nature do you have any of those would i be able to give those tests to my listeners or do you not have them probably biz i might be able to get some of them for you probably business not as most of those but i might have some i definitely you know i i had test for writers where they would have to write a profile and write ideas for stories that they that they would pitch us i have you know i would give tests for salespeople you know if if part of being a good salesperson was going to networking events i'd have people go out in time square and get business cards and people off the street while we're walking we're can you walk step through step to that so alright you say we need a recruiter we're gonna hire a recruiter what do you do you create a job listing yeah we create a job this thing just to make it easy and then we go on linkedin and our usually we wanna pick off talent from other shops that are young and that we think are coach and and then train them and where would you on linkedin what company did you try to poach from mostly you know initially i poached from our competitors and then i discovered that they had a lot of the wrong lessons learned and that we were inventing new ways to do things and so we started building more of a pipeline directly at colleges and so we literally went to like georgetown university g w we were based in dc c at the time nyu and like looked for kids and top universities and hire them and build a pipeline build an internship program that that's what we eventually did we also though with look for you know young scrappy people who are working in not necessarily working in in jobs of reflect what we do like not looking at like media companies so what would you type in on linkedin to find this recruiter oh i'll give you a good example like i love hiring salespeople people for media companies who work in software because software sales reps can run circles around media sales reps like in general and so then for this for let's say a recruiter you're on linkedin what do you do you say like alright so biz now was a real estate media company would you say like alright political is a political media company they're in dc let's go out them yeah for writers i would definitely do things like that so i would i would connect to them on linkedin and in the message where it says like you know how do you i know how do wanna connect to i would write like hey can we jump on a call you know i'm we're interested we're hiring for a position i thought you might know someone i learned my lesson the hard way you don't say we're interested in you or you might get a call from like their boss pissed off i i would also cold call people at their office i literally google map them call their office and hit like you know hit four for sales and like you know and try to find the sales department and then be like hey we're looking for you know somebody would could i tell a bit about it and then they'd be like what it what it was what does their say about and then i would tell them how amazing the position is initially and then yeah that would get them they might be like they might whisper and be like can i call you can call you back in a second you know like they're gonna walk outside and call me and then i would persuade them to come in for an interview and then in the interview what what would you do so i would usually tell them upfront i would so i was usually at my my either myself or recruiter do a very very brief interview just to make sure that they're excited about the role and then i would tell them if there's going to be there's the the for the next step is a test and if they said to me or my recruiter like that's for dick you know i'm too senior to take you know or it just felt awkward then they usually if had a recruiter they would elevate it to me as a ceo i would call and persuade them of like why this role is worth taking the test for okay i'm sorry guys that's the end i hope you liked it if you wanna listen to the whole thing go to trends dot c and you'll sign up it's only a dollar so you pay a buck and you get fourteen days for free and if you don't like it just cancel and you're only out a dollar so go to trends c sign up you're gonna get is a weekly email with all of our research where we dive deep into different companies and explain what's growing quickly and why it's growing quickly and how to pounce on it you're gonna get access to our community where ryan bi man the guy who just listen to along with a lot of people like over ten thousand people just like him are in talking about interesting stuff and you're also gonna get access to a library of these podcasts so trends dot c check it out so see yep