He Said $35M Was Enough, Then Moved His Family to a 150-Acre Farm (Ryan Levesque)

0:00Welcome back to another episode of Moneywise. I'm your host, Daniel. This one's different. I usually jump in every couple of minutes to drag numbers out of my guests, but today I ask one question and effectively just shut up. Ryan Levesque is the best storyteller I've ever had on the show. So this is our longest episode and I cut almost none of it. It's also the only episode I've ever recorded where I had to stop myself from crying mid-interview. So viewer discretion advised. I won't give you the full story, but here are a few pieces. Ryan quit his job in China the morning a WSJ headline said his company was going bankrupt.

0:34His first business was Scrabble Tile Jewelry, and he eventually got offers for$42 million and$70 million for a different business, which are two incredibly stressful stories he recounts. You'll hear why. At one point, when he was 30 years old, he received a rejection letter from a life insurance company with news no 30-year-old ever wants to hear. What makes Ryan's story particularly interesting is that he amassed a life-changing amount of money. But due to a health scare and a wake-up call, he decided to radically build his life around the things he valued most. And radical is an understatement.

1:10His story really does go into parts of philosophy and life and value that a lot of stories in this show don't even touch. He now runs a 150-acre farm with his wife and two kids and 80 % of the food he and his family consume comes straight from his own land. He walks through the specific cost of running his farm and all the different intricacies that come with doing something as unique as what it is like to run a farm of this size. Listening to Ryan was like listening to my dad tell a bedtime story. It's really that engaging and I hope you enjoy the conversation with Ryan as much as I did. One quick favor, if you're listening to this on audio, please hit subscribe or follow.

1:52Audio downloads are how I get paid and your boy got mouths to feed. Please follow and subscribe. Lastly, a lot of the conversations I have on MoneyWise are a direct result of the network I've built in Hampton. Hampton is a private network for high growth founders and CEOs doing$25 million on average. If you're looking for a group of people that will genuinely change how you view life, business, and money, look no further. Go to joinhampton.com. Now, without further ado, here's Ryan. Well, welcome back to another episode of Money Wise. I have a really special guest today, Ryan. And man, I've already learned so much about him and I feel like I've just barely scratched the surface.

2:32And so I'm really excited to learn a bit more today and hopefully my listeners will be as engaged as I was when I first met him. Thanks for joining us today, Ryan. Daniel, it's great to be here. Thanks. I would love to just start from the beginning. I feel like when we first met, You just kind of told me your story all at once. And I was like, it was like a kid listening to his dad read a storybook. And so I would just love for you to start from the beginning. Tell me how you grew up, what money was like in the household, and kind of walk me through some chapters of your life. And I'll maybe interrupt here and there to ask some follow-up questions, but you're a great storyteller.

3:06And so I'd love for you to tell your story. That sounds great. Well, I'll start not at the very beginning, but at the beginning. I grew up in a pretty blue collar, working class household. My dad worked nights loading boxes on the back of a truck for the U.S. Postal Service. And my mom cut hair for a living. Neither of my parents went to college. I was the first in my family to go to college. And I studied neuroscience and East Asian studies at Brown University. And at one point thought I was going to go to medical school. I was fascinated with the brain and thought I was going to kind of pursue that path.

3:42But I decided it really wasn't for me and tried to figure out what it is that I wanted to do. So after graduating, I worked on Wall Street. I first worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then later had an opportunity to work for AIG, the insurance company, which promised to send me to China to lead and expand the sales office expansion across the country. And they were looking for a young guy like me who was hungry, young, could speak Mandarin Chinese, had a little bit of a background in finance, and could kind of be this bridge between home office in the United States and Asia. And so I did that for a good part of my 20s.

4:23My wife and I moved from New York City to China. First, we landed in Shanghai. Then my wife decided to pursue a PhD at Hong Kong University. So for the first three years of our marriage, we had this crazy bi-country marriage. And it was very romantic. We'd fly to see each other on the weekend. She'd fly up from Hong Kong to Shanghai. I'd fly from Shanghai or whatever city I was in that week, opening up a sales office across the country to Hong Kong. And that's like not close. I mean, a lot of people who maybe aren't as familiar with the geography in China, oh, it's like, you know, that's like long distance relationship.

4:57It was long distance. It was like, you know, the equivalent of like living in the East Coast. One of you living on the East Coast and then the other person living either in the middle of the country, like Chicago and New York, or depending on where he's flying from, New York to LA. So we did that for a few years. And then in 2008, the world financial crisis hit and AIG was one of the companies that was really shaken up. And I remember walking into my office one day and the Wall Street Journal Asia edition headline read, AIG to file for bankruptcy. and it was one of these moments that was a pivot point in my life because up until that point, I had kind of dreamed of starting my own business, but was really afraid to pull the trigger.

5:41And that was sort of like the, the, the kick in the pants that I needed to finally do the thing that I'd been dreaming about doing for so long. So literally that day, um, I, I called my wife. I said, go to wsj.com, take a look at what the headline reads. She says, what does that mean for your job and your career. And I said, I don't know, but I'm going to use this as the opportunity to do the thing that I've been talking about for so long. So I printed up a resignation letter in the printer of my office. I, it was, the paper was still hot. I signed it. I walked into my boss's office, who was a president of China for AIG.

6:15And I said, I don't have great news for you here today, but I've made the decision that I'm turning in my notice. And he thought, who recruited you? And who did, who stole, you know, you away? And I said, the reality is it's nobody. But I just feel like now's the time and I want to do my own thing. So I gave my notice. I donated everything that I owned to charity except for two suitcases worth of stuff. Moved into student housing with my wife in Hong Kong. Yeah, in Hong Kong. And we were decided to live on a tiny little island in Hong Kong called Ma Wan, which is an island in Hong Kong SAR that you can only get to by ferry.

6:58So it was this tiny little island that we were living on. She would commute to class when she needed to get to class. And it was on that island that I started my very first business. When you, real quick, when you heard about the AIG news and you decided to resign, about how much money did you have to your name at that point? Oh, goodness. It's a really good question. And, you know, I have not, this is going back quite a few years now. This is 2008. So we're looking at almost 20 years ago at this time. I want to say, I mean, I had a good chunk of my money tied up in a 401k. So I had a little bit of money that was saved away, but I had squirreled away as much as I could.

7:45You know, in terms of money in the bank, gosh, I have to say maybe it was like$100 ,000. So you were successful at AIG, but maybe still risk averse, leaving was scary. Oh yeah, for sure. And I could be, I'm not off by an order of magnitude, but I could be off by like$100 ,000. Like it could be$200 ,000. It was not half a million I'm pretty sure if I think back to that time. It was enough money that I had a little bit of a safety net, but it wasn't an infinite safety net. Sure. And at that time, I remember running the calculus through my mind, and it was I could either invest a quarter million dollars and maybe go into debt to go to business school, or I could take a fraction of that and everything that I'd saved up until that point and invest it in starting a business and basically paying tuition to the school of hard knocks.

8:39And that's what I decided to do. And there was a time in my life where I laughed that I was the least educated person in my company when I went on to become CEO of our business. And I'll tell a little bit about that story. I mean, even my assistant had an MBA and my wife, you know, a master's degree and pursued a PhD. And here I was, you know, like a lowly bachelor's degree. But it was on that island that I started our, we started our first business. And it was a tiny random business. We found this website, which was brand new at the time. It's old news now, but in 2007, 2008, it was a brand new website called Etsy.com.

9:21And the cool thing about - Never heard of it. Never heard of it. But at the time, I had never heard of it at that time either. My wife had come across it just being in that world. And she said, hey, there's this really cool website. It's called Etsy. And there's this jewelry that's selling really well. And it involves combining Scrabble tiles and origami paper. And when you put them together in a certain way, they create these pendants that people are buying like crazy. And living in Asia and having access to all of the origami paper that you could imagine, I thought, oh, we're really well positioned to potentially to do a business in this.

9:57But I said, look, I don't want to build a business that's going to tie us to any location. I don't want to, you know, have like a factory in Southern China that's producing, manufacturing this jewelry and we're exporting it. And I just don't want that life. So we shut the door on that idea until a few weeks later she said, hey, I want to bring back the Scrabble Tile jewelry thing. And I know you're done with the idea of selling the jewelry, but take a look at this woman here. And the woman's name, ironically, was named Ryan. So I always remember that because there are not that many women named Ryan.

10:26And she had this business that was teaching people how to make the jewelry. and she would sell this tutorial on how to make the jewelry step-by-step. And what was fascinating about Etsy, and even it's true to this day, is that you can reverse engineer someone's income because you can see what their daily sales are and you can extrapolate how much they're selling their product for. And she was selling this tutorial for something like$30 or$40 at the time. And she was selling typically between 20 and 30 units per day. And when I ran the numbers, I'm thinking to myself, Like she's making almost a thousand dollars a day with, and that's all margin.

11:06There's no cost of good soul selling a digital tutorial on how to make this jewelry. I said, this could be something. So, so my wife, Tylene learned how to make the jewelry, created a better mousetrap, a better tutorial. Cause the one I was describing was actually not very good. I mean, it was a Microsoft word document with spelling mistakes and the images weren't even aligned. The lighting was terrible. I mean, it wasn't a very good product. So we thought we could build a better mousetrap. And it was a lesson that I took from that that I've applied my entire life, which is to emulate before you innovate.

11:38To find something that's working and reverse engineer. And before you try to go off and do something creative and completely different, figure out if you can at least achieve a baseline based on what's already working in the market. So we did that very thing. I'm sorry. I said don't reinvent the wheel. I mean, it's perfect analogy there. Yeah. And so we went down this path. First month in business, we make a few hundred dollars, then a few thousand dollars. And I think at our peak, we're making something like seven or eight thousand dollars a month. And then, I don't know if you heard about this in 2008, but there was another crash, which was the crash of the Scrabble tile jewelry market.

12:20where it was a more like crash. No, I am not aware of this one. No, joking aside, I did play Scrabble with my family a lot growing up. So it's a funny little Venn diagram there, but tell me about the crash of Scrabble. It was a total fad, as you might expect. It was one of these things that just kind of took the world by fire for like a six month period and then just fell off a cliff. And so I kind of learned the hard way that when you go into a business, when you choose a business, when you choose a market, how important it is to choose an evergreen market. That if you go into a fad market, that it can take off really, really fast, but it can fall off a cliff.

13:00So we kind of went back to square one. And at that time, we said, well, what are we going to do? She was close to finishing her PhD. I was not making any income at this point because our business basically crashed. We decided to move back to the States. We decided to move back to Texas, which is where my wife is from. She got a job as a museum curator at the Brownsville Historical Association on the Mexico border in a very significant border town of Brownsville, Texas. And I started building our business. And I'd kind of learned the power of education and selling tutorials and selling how-to information.

13:32I also learned the power of not being in a fad market, but getting into an evergreen market. So the next business that we started was in the gardening space, which is the oldest hobby that's been around forever in America. And I want to pause here so that the listeners keep note of this because this comes into play in your story later. It comes full circle. Yeah, it very much comes full circle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when we lived in Shanghai, I just had this memory when I bought my wife a whole bunch of orchids, the flower, in our apartment when she came to visit because I wanted to beautify the apartment.

14:10And otherwise, Shanghai is a, if you've never been, it's often like brown, yellow sky. it's overcast it's like a it's an industrial sort of concrete jungle it's not a necessarily beautiful place so i wanted to beautify the apartment i bought a bunch of orchids and by the time she came to visit all the orchids had died and i thought to myself what did i do like like i can't be the only idiot out there who can't keep these things alive and so i started doing research when i was trying to figure out different markets to go into and it turns out that orchids are one of these things that a lot of people have trouble.

14:46They're kind of finicky. They're finicky plants. And they're, you know, one of the widest grown flowers in the entire world. And so I started going down this path of, well, maybe there's a business we could build in this space. And so long story short, I kind of applied everything I'd learned in the Scrabble market to the orchid market. And then we grew that business from nothing to about half a million dollars a year. And I realized, okay, this is a process I can replicate. So I started doing the same thing in market after market after market. And at one point I had gone into almost two dozen different markets and these tiny little niche businesses like this and orchid care and memory improvement and scrabble tile jewelry and random markets that you wouldn't even think about.

15:29And my vision at that time was I said, if I could get into 20 markets and I could build a 20 half million dollar niche businesses, I'd have a$10 million a year sort of micro empire, if you will. But what I quickly learned is that there was no ability to cross sell products and it was very schizophrenic. And, you know, it was an effort to diversify and not be in any one market in case the same thing happened with Scrabble Tile Jewelry, where it just kind of disappeared. I wouldn't be in this case where 100 % of my income would disappear overnight. But along the way, I started teaching and talking about what it is that I was doing and how I was entering all these different markets and started to get some attention.

16:07And I had bigger and bigger businesses that were reaching out to me, offering to pay me increasing sums of money to basically do what I was doing, but apply it in their business. And eventually I settled on this model where I would get paid a revenue share or royalty of the income that we would generate together. And so I did this in, for example, the golf market, partnered with a company and we grew a golf audience to about 10 million golfers. Wow. Hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and ultimately sold that business to NBC, to the golf channel and NBC. How much did you sell for? It's now called Golf Pass is the brand.

16:50I'm very familiar with the golf pass. Yeah. So Revolution Golf. What was the sale price? It was over... This one, I don't know that I'm allowed to share because I don't know that it's been shared publicly. I can say it was over$100 million. It was a nine-figure sale. And you made what from that sale personally? I made a small... I got a small piece of it because I wasn't a majority partner in this business. I got a small piece of it. Like 5 million? No, no, no. Like less than seven figures, like a high six-figure. Yeah, just a small thing. This wasn't the big moneymaker for me. it was the there's money to be made doing what it is that I'm doing.

17:27It was like the first time that I saw like big money knowing the tiny little piece that I got. And then so I did it again in the business funding market. I partnered with an entrepreneur and building a company called Swift Capital, eventually sold to PayPal. This one I think is public. I think it was$168 million and rebranded around Loan Builder. And basically what I had developed was this methodology using assessments and diagnostics and quizzes and surveys to not only figure out what it is that people want to buy in different markets, but build marketing funnels that sift and sort people into different buckets and customize the messaging and the offers that you put in front of people.

18:13I've used a lot of tools like that. There are a lot of tools like that, but this is 20 years ago. You have to remember that. Yeah, right. Before it's time, for sure. Before it's time. Yeah. From that, did you make a good stake from that? Again, another small sort of exit. Yeah. But what it kind of gave me was this confidence that I think I have something here. And so a few years later, I decided to write a book. The book is called Ask. And it really revealed sort of the methodology that I developed and that I was implementing in all these different markets. And surprisingly, the book went on to become the number one bestselling book in the country the week it launched.

18:52Not in a category, not in like a random subcategory, the bestselling book in the country. It just took off and it was not something that I expected. and I shared my story of what had happened in my life and how I had sort of built this and I shared the methodology. And the book really served as the cornerstone for what became the company that generated most of my wealth, a company called the Ask Method Company, where we started teaching and training people how to implement this methodology. And I could name, you know, if you look at the family tree, the lineage of companies that are using this sort of marketing methodology in their business, you could pretty much trace almost every single one of them to the work that I worked on and introduced into the marketplace.

19:41Companies like Noom, if you're familiar with Noom, you know, students, clients, Automatic, WordPress. I mean, I could go on and on and on. The number of the companies that you would recognize name brand companies who have, you know, gone through what it is that we developed. So I built a training and education company. And then very quickly, the need in the marketplace was a technology to implement what it is that we're doing. Because people were sort of hacking together Google Forms or they were using SurveyGizmo or, you know, other in other cases, Typeform and products like that to try to make the methodology work.

20:19But it didn't really quite fit. So we built a technology product, scaled that and collectively built a seven time Inc 5000 company. generated well over$100 million in revenue. And this takes us to about 2021. 2021 sort of had this feeling that, okay, I've been on this path now for more than a decade and I'm getting kind of tired. And I've got two boys, two kids that are growing up faster than I could ever imagine. And a few things happened in my life, which I'm happy to talk about in more detail, that kind of led me to say, all right, I think I want to sell this business. It's time to get out.

21:03And so 2021 comes around. We take the business to market. We hire a business broker. And we get a bunch of offers and get into an exclusive with a private equity firm, go down this path. It was a majority recap for$42.5 million. And we take that deal pretty far down the line. And sort of at the 11th hour, they decide that they're going to flip the terms of the deal on us and they're going to do a minority recap. And instead of$42 million, we're going to walk away with$17 million. Why did that happen? It's a move that private equity does. I've learned retro you know sort of um ice the kicker a little bit yeah as a little bit like yeah i mean they will you know private equity not to say that everybody in private equity is um disingenuous and dishonest but there's certain moves sort of like um i was watching my son's soccer game the other day and we were at a tournament and the opposing coach was doing this move the opposing team was up one nothing and to burn out the clock in the second half of the game, he was subbing every time that there was a stoppage of play, he would sub his players and he would sub whichever player was furthest away from the bench.

22:24So let's say the bench is over here. You've got a left back that's like in the far corner of the field to maximize the amount of time it takes to sub out a player. Now, is that against the rules? No. Is it kind of, am I allowed to swear on this or do I have to keep it? You should go for it. Is it kind of a dick move? It's a total dick move. Yeah. Right? How old is your son? These are like, at the time he was 13. Yeah. Especially for 13, man. It's like, come on. Well, that's why, I mean, I was, you know, doing a little heckling. I was like, great job teaching your players what good sportsmanship is like.

23:00Yeah. Congratulations. patience. Like, well done, coach. And so is it against the rules? No. Is it kind of a dick move? Yes. And I think there are a lot of these dick moves in private equity that I've since learned, having gone through the process a few times now. And this is one of them. You get a majority recap at the 11th hour. Hey, by the way, we're going to do a minority recap. You're only going to walk away with this much money. It's going to be great. At this point, they've worn you down. You've been through diligence. You're exhausted. You've been distracted from running the business. At this point, you're like, whatever, I'm going to take the amount of money.

23:34We did something unexpected. We basically gave them the middle finger and said, we're not taking the deal. Go screw yourself. They couldn't believe it. So they didn't expect that. They did not expect that. What was that conversation like when you said no? What words did you use? And then how did they react? Probably words that I would not want to say out loud on this interview. Um, probably a few not so nice words. Um, but we did all this through an intermediary. That's why you work with an intermediary. It's like when you're selling real estate, you know, emotions get high when there's a buyer and a seller.

24:07And in our case, we also had a deal sponsor. So like they're complicated deals that can show up where we had a business broker. They, uh, we're a deal sponsor came up and found our deal, brought it to multiple financial institutions and put together basically a lead money investor. And so there's multiple kind of parties involved. So it's not as complicated as like, it's not as simple as like me and then like one guy who controls all the money on the other side and we're negotiating, you know, head to head. There are lawyers involved. I mean, these deals get, you know, at this level get pretty involved.

24:45So we said, you know, we're not doing it. The deal sponsor scrambled, tried to find another deal, But we basically were kind of fed up with our intermediary, our business broker as well. And we said, we're done. We thought that they didn't do a great job representing us in the process. They didn't run a good auction. Like when you're selling a company, you want to do a, you know, you want to get a deal frenzy and you want to get an auction type environment. And, you know, it was, I was a rookie. I was going through the process for the first time. All right. So fast forward another year. we're out of a, there's a tail period typically when you work with an intermediary where basically if you close a deal within a certain number of months after you end the relationship with that broker or investment bank, that they are entitled to whatever payout they would have gotten had they closed the deal.

25:33And you have to be mindful of this because what it does is it forces you, if you're going to operate within integrity, which is something that's really, really important to me. When you operate in integrity, you're not going to re-engage any party that they may have interfaced with during the terms of the deal. And the challenge is like, that's a very broad definition because when you're like putting out a SIM, an offering memorandum about your business to a lot of different institutions, chances are your intermediary has touched a good chunk of the market, let's just say. So we decided to buy ourselves a year.

26:12In the meantime, we do a very detailed process where I learned my lesson not to just hire an intermediary based on a recommendation from a colleague and in some cases, multiple colleagues. I did a full process. I interviewed 12 investment banks, ran them through a very rigorous process as if I were hiring any vendor or any employee in a company. and ultimately landed on our favorite at the end. So we engaged not a business broker in the second time around, but in a true investment bank, a middle market investment bank who thought that we could probably get more money for the business than what we were going to accept in the first go around.

26:56So another year goes by. It's late 2021. That was 2020 into 21. So I know I said 21, but it's 2020 into 2021. Now we're 2021, going into 2022. We're working with this new investment bank. Same thing. We bring the business to market. We do it properly. We get a bunch of interest. And ultimately, we get an offer to purchase a majority of the company for$70 million. So from$42 and a half to$70 million in literally the course of about a year, give or take. Same thing. We're going through the process, a bunch of diligence, quality of earnings, like all the things that you normally have to go through.

27:37And it's super stressful if you haven't gone through this because you're having to hit your numbers every single month. You're, you know, you're trying to manage this process and also manage the business. And so we got a purchase agreement drafted up. We're ready to go, ready to sign, get down to literally the one yard line. And this is now in about February 2022. And if you remember what happened that month in the world, this is when unexpectedly out of nowhere, Russia invades the Ukraine. Russia invades the Ukraine. Capital markets respond by basically panicking. The crypto market crashes. Interest rates spike considerably.

28:15And all of a sudden, the entire private equity business model of put super low interest rate debt on these private companies, basically do a leveraged buyout. that model evaporates. And the private equity firm that we had gotten the offer from basically withdrew not only our deal, but every deal that they were looking at at the time. We go back to market and every other party that was interested in us, it's the same story. In 2022, for anybody who was doing M &A work at that time, with a few exceptions, the M &A market completely dried up. Like it just basically evaporated. And I'm thinking to myself, crap, we missed the window to sell our business.

28:59Shoot. And it was one of those moments where, you know, if I had a Mulligan opportunity and if I had the DeLorean and I could go back in time, I would have just worked with the investment bank that we worked with the second time around, brought the business to market in 2020, 2021, would have sold and would have probably, you know, you know, even for the 17 million or would you have tried with, with, for the 17, I don't think I would have sold for the 17. Cause that's a gross number. Meaning like that's pre any taxes. Sure. It's, so you're going to make less than 10 after all of a sudden. And I also had a minority partner, have a minority partner in the business that would have gotten a piece of it.

29:40So when you look at it all said and done, you know, and that's the thing with like LinkedIn numbers and, you know, you know, a lot of numbers that you see thrown around online is like they're gross numbers. When you actually kind of chisel back what you walk away with as a founder, it's a significantly smaller number than that. And 17 was not really enough to change my life in any way. And I would have still had the business. I still would have been the majority owner of the business. I'd still be running and running the business. And now I'd have this private equity partner probably breathing down my neck, forcing me to grow, cracking the whip.

30:16And I didn't want to give up the autonomy and control. So have you sold it then or did this deal completely fall through? The 70 million deal falls through. And now I'm like, I've tried to sell this company twice. And I'm thinking, I'm never selling this company. It's just, it's not going to happen. So that summer, I kind of, you know, I don't want to say it was a depression, but I definitely had a moment of like, this is not how this story was supposed to end. Like, this is not like, I just busted my ass. I did everything right. You know, seven timing, 5 ,000, like tens of thousands of customers, all these positive reviews, like, you know, great growth, recurring revenue, like all the things that you're told to do.

31:01And what I think a lot of people don't have a, um, accurate attribution toward, is the role that luck plays in life. Like we tend to over attribute bad luck to things that don't go right. We kind of say, oh, that was bad luck. And we don't take responsibility as much as we maybe should because it's a way to preserve the ego. And then when things go really well, we tend to take more credit than we really should take. So much of life is timing. And I think if we had been even three months earlier, the deal would have closed. And you and I would be having a very different conversation right now. But I also believe, and this is just a choice to believe this story, is that everything in life plays out for a reason.

31:50There is a reason that things unfold the way they unfold. And however things unfold is absolutely perfect. So tell me how you justify the reasons some of this happened and where it led in your life. Because I know there's a lot that happened after this. Yeah, like everything. everything. And so, you know, this is in many ways, like if we look at the number line, these are the negative integers that are going to get us to zero on the story that we're going to talk about in terms of what happens next. Because none of what is about to happen next would have taken place had this story unfolded any other way.

32:25And I want to get into what your life looks like now, because I think it's shockingly different than the story that you just told. But before we do that, I wanted to ask you about the health scare. You didn't get into this, and it was a little earlier in your story, but I know it meant so much for what now your life looks like. And can you tell me what happened and when in that storyline that happened? So if we go back in reverse to the point in the story where I had built the orchid business and the memory business, and I was in all these different markets, and I was partnering with these different companies and the golf business and the business funding market and all these others.

33:08I was at one point, I think in 23 different businesses. And I was working as hard as you can imagine it would require to do that. Like I was just burning the midnight oil. I was just pre-kids working seven days a week, you know, like a hundred hours a week, just, you know, working all the time. Got to the point where we would even go on vacation for a few days. and I use air quotes for that. And I would have like back-to-back calls. Like I was literally just traveling to a new location and like on the phone all day. It was like no point in actually traveling. And so my first son is born and I just turned 30 years old.

33:52My first son is born. I just turned 30 years old. And my wife says, Ryan, you're a father now. You need to apply for life insurance. and at that time burning the midnight oil. I had lost a bunch of weight. I wasn't quite sure why, but I kind of attributed it to the fact that I wasn't working out at the gym. I wasn't eating really healthy. I was again, working really hard. And now on top of that, I've got this newborn baby. So neither my wife nor I are sleeping through the night. Okay. And she says, I want you to apply for life insurance. I apply for life insurance. I have a business trip. We're living in Austin, Texas at the time.

34:26Traveled to New York City for a business trip. I come back home. There's a letter from the life insurance company waiting for me on my desk. I open it up, one page letter, and the letter says, your application for life insurance has been denied. Now, I don't know if you know anything about life insurance, but generally speaking, the only way you're denied coverage is if you have something like significantly wrong with your file. Usually it's just an increase in cost if it's not totally bizarre. Exactly, they'll say you can be a smoker, you can be a drinker, you can be obese, and you can get life insurance coverage.

34:59So I called the life insurance agent. By the way, part of the process, they do a medical exam. You have to draw blood. They do a medical exam and everything like that. So I called the life insurance agent. He says, yes, I have your file in front of me. And he says, yes, I have the results of your labs. And I think you should write down these numbers, number one. And number two, I'm not a doctor, but I think you need to go see one. Wow. And I write my numbers down from my labs. And of course, I hung up the phone, did what everybody would do, immediately went to Google, Dr. Google, to see what these lab results mean.

35:41And basically when I Googled what my lab results were, it was kidney failure, renal system shutdown, and pancreatic cancer. And if you know anything about cancer, pancreatic cancer is, uh, it's a death sentence. Yeah. That's a, that's no good. And so I'm having this moment of like immediately thinking, well, two thoughts. One, what did I do to my body? Like I pushed myself so hard that my body is just collapsing. That's number one. And number two was denial. I thought my lab results had to have gotten mixed up with somebody else's. Had to have been the case. So I tell my wife what happens. She starts breaking down.

36:27She says, well, I'm going to call the ask a nurse hotline. We're going to get an emergency doctor's appointment first thing tomorrow morning. We're going to explain what happened and we'll go from there. So that's what we did. Go to the doctor's next day, explain what happened. Doctor says, we'll have some lab results ordered. Go to the lab. We'll order them stat. Stay in the waiting room. I'll be out as soon as the results are ready. I do that. A little while later, he comes out into the lobby. And I remember it like it was yesterday. He walks up to me. He grabs me by the shoulders. He looks me in the eyes and he says, Mr.

36:58Levesque, you should be in a coma right now. We have to rush you to the emergency room. So they rushed me to the ER. And I'm thinking to myself, what is happening? And what had happened, Daniel, is that I had slipped into a state known as DKA, diabetic ketoacidosis. And I was an undiagnosed type one diabetic and my organs were shutting down. My pancreas had completely stopped working, was not producing any insulin. My kidneys were failing. All of this was true. And they had to keep me in ICU for almost 10 days to basically bring my body back into a recalibrated state. And I emerged from the hospital as a type one diabetic, an insulin dependent diabetic.

37:52I have an artificial pancreas. I have an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor. And to this day, the doctors tell me, had I waited even just another day, I could have passed out, slipped into a coma and died. And so it was one of these moments where like, had my wife not applied for life insurance, I would have just kept pushing it. I would have just kept, you know, burning the midnight oil, working hard. and I had all of the symptoms, but none of it made sense. Like for example, I'd lost all this weight. So my body lost the ability to metabolize the food that I was eating, was just eating away at muscle tissue.

38:27I had all the telltale symptoms where I was thirsty all the time. And I was having to get up in the middle of the night to pee like three, four, five times in the middle of the night. But the story I told myself, as crazy as this sounds, is I'm living in Texas. I'm a kid from New England I married a Texan you moved to Texas it's 110 degrees I can't handle the heat so I'm thirsty all the time I'm drinking all this water because my body just can't handle the 110 degree heat because I'm drinking so much water I'm having to pee a bunch of times in the middle of the night and because I'm having to pee so much I'm exhausted because I'm getting up like all the time so that was the cycle that I told myself was it was just that was a story that I convinced myself was true So in retrospect, my body was shutting down.

39:16So in my first book, Ask, I tell the story of what had happened and how it inspired me when I was in ICU. I had a six-month-old baby at home. And if you can imagine, like, you know, I can't. I was six months old. My kid couldn't see me because I had a dialysis patient next to me and a cancer patient next to me. You don't take a six-month-old baby to the ICU. And I'm thinking to myself, my kid can't grow up without a dad. It was like one of those moments where you're just like, yeah, something's got to change. So in that schizophrenic business era, when I was in all these different markets, I decided to shut it all down.

40:03And I decided to write a book, sharing my story up until that point and everything that I'd learned. And the book, as I mentioned earlier, went on to become a number one national bestseller and it served as the cornerstone for building a company and helping other businesses and entrepreneurs build what it is that's using that ask methodology that I developed. So that was a big milestone in life. And it was something that came back again when fast forward over a decade later, I'm now staring down the barrel of a gun, metaphorically speaking, And I'm thinking to myself, am I going to spend another decade going through the process of scaling a company to get to the next market cycle when we can sell this again?

40:52And I'll tell you, man, there's a photo I have of my kids. And you and I maybe talked about this when we touched base before this conversation. And it's my two boys and they're walking down this path. And they're probably three and five. and they're in these like oversized rain boots that are just like too big for their feet and they're holding hands. And I just remember, I remember snapping that photo being like, I want to remember this one. And then I have a photo that is seven years later and they're now 10 and 13 years old. And I'll tell you, dude, it was like a heartbeat between taking those two photos.

41:38and I said to myself, I have so little time left with these boys at home. And I had this moment where I said, if I did sell the company and I'd made$70 million, and it would have been much less than that after taxes and partner split and everything like that. But if I'd walked away, even with half that much, if I'd walked away with$35 million on the back of the sale, what would I have done with the money? and I'll tell you man the answer was simple it was um I'd move my family uh to live a life immersed in nature and start a farm together and then I had one of these moments where it was like dude what's stopping you from doing that now and the answer was nothing so while my boys were at summer camp one summer, that summer after we didn't sell the company, I decided to travel to Vermont to earn my PDC, which is a permaculture design certification, living in a tent, bathing in a pond for the summer, learning how to raise and grow food with my own two hands.

42:47And it was while I was there that I had this awakening where I just felt like this is what the next chapter of our life was meant to be. So I text my wife while I'm on this farm on one bar of service. And I said, honey, let's do it. Let's do the thing that we've been talking about doing. Let's put the house on the market in Austin and let's just see what happens. Who knows? We'd already lined up a real estate agent. We'd already taken photos of the house. We'd already done video. We already been talking about maybe doing something different, like making this big life change. We had all the pieces lined up.

43:19I said, just put the house on the market and let's just see what happens. And literally that night I get a text message back. And this is in the middle of a very hot real estate market in Austin. First couple to see our house, they make an offer, all cash, full price, and they want a 14 day close. I remember having this moment of like, all right, like this is happening. Let's do this. This is happening. Wow. And so I text my wife back. I was like, let's accept the offer. I'm docu-signing with like one bar of service on my phone with my finger. And I had to pack up my tent and get my butt back to Texas from Vermont.

43:58Um, we put everything we owned into storage, sent it up to Boston, from Austin to Boston, sold one of our cars. And with two kids, a dog, and a truck and one suitcase each, we road trip from Texas to Vermont with nothing but a dream and a vision to find our own farm where we as a family can learn how to raise and grow our own food. Every year when summer ends, you tell yourself it's finally time to start taking health seriously. But work picks up, schedules fill, and your health slips down the priority list again. Does this sound familiar? This, my friends, is why a growing number of Hampton members have been loving Daily Body Coach.

44:35It's become an inside secret within the community for getting lean, strong, and healthy without the mental load of having to think about training and nutrition. Daily Body Coach is run by a Hampton member, Anthony Monica, who's also a software founder. And you feel that pedigree come through in this experience. As a customer, you get your own team of trainers, nutritionists, and psychologists who take the time to understand how you operate, what tends to throw you off, and what your daily life actually looks like. The result is a highly personalized operating system that's guaranteed to deliver results.

45:02If you want to avoid falling off, restarting, and repeating the same old cycle, you need a system that can work long-term. Which means it needs to be designed around your existing habits. That's what Daily Body Coach builds for you. So if you want to transform the way you look and feel and start taking your health seriously over the long-term, you've got to try Daily Body Coach. Click the link in the description or go to dailybodycoach.com slash moneywise, and I'll connect you directly with Anthony. Did you, okay, let's break this down because first I'm trying not to cry while you're telling your story about the kids because it resonates with me so much.

45:36So I'm just silent over here while I get bottled up. I have two boys. Your story resonates with me. I was in the hospital on not my deathbed, but a very major back surgery that I had when my son was six months old. Uh, and I remember barely cause I had so much drugs in my system, him coming and asking his daddy. Okay. And me just being very much not okay. And having a similar midlife crisis where it's like, good God, like, what am I doing here? You know, my body's falling apart. Um, your stories, business builder to what you're doing now, that's drastically different. I'm curious with what you're doing now on the farm.

46:13And I'd love to hear how this story ended with your life on this massive, you know, I believe 150 acre farm, like what was your thinking while you were looking for this property? Did you have a budget in mind? Did you have a specific land size in mind? Did you want it to be, you know, fully built already? Or do you want to build on, you know, bare land? I mean, walk me through your thinking in this time period where like, I'm going to go do this thing, but it's so different than anything in your story prior to this point. All right. I'll tell you, man.

46:48Back when I was applying to college, I wrote this college essay. It was super cheesy in retrospect, but it'll illustrate this point. When I was a kid, I had all these things I wanted to do in my life. And I wrote this college essay, again, kind of cheesy. And it was basically like if I was a cat and I had nine lives, this is what I would do in each of my nine lives. And when I wrote the essay, I wrote it in an interesting way. Like one of the nine lives I wrote in a comic style because at one point in my life, I wanted to be an artist. It was a sort of in the style of an editorial cartoon. I wrote another one in the style of sheet music.

47:27So it was actually sheet music with notes and it was actual, you could play the music. I wrote another one in French. I wrote another one as a poem. Every single one was like a different style and it kind of exhibited the fact that I couldn't decide what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to do all these things, but there was no sort of career path that enabled that. And I think for me, my career path and my life path has been this one that has been filled with seasons. Like I lived in New York City and I worked on Wall Street and I worked in finance, then all over Southeast Asia for this season of life, then built a company in the entrepreneurial hotbed of Austin, Texas, and then spent the last half decade in the green mountains of Vermont, wants learning how to raise and grow our own food.

48:09And I see different chapters that are ahead. And so I don't think like to me and like in retrospect, it might feel like, oh, this is sort of, you know, sort of random, you know, moves along the way. But to me, it feels perfect. This is just one of these nine lives that I've been trying to practice. Like a musical composition almost. Exactly. It's, you know, I think about it as like, this is an album. If you think about like the musicology of your life and you think about like your entire, you know, IMDB or, uh, every collaboration that you've done for me, this is just an album. This season is an album and it's not forever, but in this album, I've got collaborators and I'm learning to play different instruments that maybe I haven't played before on previous albums.

48:55And it's going to, it's going to support and serve whatever comes next. So, so for me, I wanted to, to answer your direct question. um i'd i've i've gone deep down the rabbit hole of pretty much everything we've done from building a business to learning finance i mean i what i didn't share was when i was when i was 12 years old 10 years old excuse me um both of my grandparents on my mom's side passed away and they didn't have much um to their name but they left my mom a little bit of money and she basically passed all of it to my sister and me we each got five thousand dollars and she said, you can do whatever you want with the$5 ,000.

49:33You can save it. You can spend it. You can invest it. And I wanted to learn how to invest. And I read every Peter Lynch book. This is in the 1990s. At 10 years old? 10 years old. I read One Up on Wall Street. I read Learn to Earn. That might be a record. Peter Lynch at 10 years old. I was reading Peter Lynch. And then this is what gets even more interesting. You might be too young to remember this, but the S &P used to put out these big phone book size books of these S &P tear sheets, which are basically one pagers on all these companies. This is like pre-internet. And for whatever reason, I became obsessed with these S &P 500 phone books, where I'd be reading about and learning about all these different companies.

50:14And at the time, the technology was such that you could, there was no such thing as the internet didn't yet exist for like looking up stocks and what the price of a stock was. You could watch TV, like CNBC, or I don't even know if it was CNBC at the time. You could watch TV - See all the tickers scroll on the bottom. Yeah, ticker on the bottom page. Or you could call up a number and you could punch in the ticker symbol on the phone and it would give you what the current stock price was. And you could do that like a hundred times a day. And long story short, I transformed the$5 ,000 investment into well over$100 ,000 investing in the stock market.

50:54How old were you at that point? Between age 10 and 18. And the reason why I know these dates precisely is because when I turned 18, I had to cash out of everything to pay for my college tuition. And when I turned 18 was in 2000. Wow. It was literally right from 1992 to 2000, like the greatest, one of the greatest bull runs in the market's history had to sell because I needed the money to pay for my tuition at Bram. Right before Y2K. Right before the dot-com crash. Literally like months before the dot-com crash, I could not time the market any better. So a lot of it was dumb luck. Like a lot of it was luck.

51:39That's an example of luck. Maybe most people wouldn't give luck credit. Like it was very, very lucky. But I also didn't spend the$5 ,000 on a dirt bike. like you know i put the money in the market yeah and so i i share that story um uh because i think anything that i've done in my life i've had this deep desire to go really deep like read a hundred books on the topic and you know in the case of farming we watched as a family dozens of documentaries i've read probably a hundred books um i lived on the land we've done uh dozens of in-person workshops on how to raise every animal you can imagine.

52:17So when we went to look for land, I had a very specific, very precise set of guidelines I was looking for. I wanted - What were a couple of those guidelines? Top of watershed, meaning there's nobody above you in the watershed. So there's nobody that can cut off your water supply or pollute the water supply by being further uphill or further up mountain. You also want to have state ag land, meaning very high quality, farmable land, on the property. In a perfect world, you've got top of watershed and you're down to the floodplain of whatever body of water that flows in to the next tributary or the next river.

52:55Very difficult to find top of watershed and floodplain on the same piece of property. There are certain things that I wanted in terms of aspects, in terms of like how the land faces north, south, east, and west, because you can grow different things based on how the land is actually facing things. I wanted a piece of land that had never been conventionally agged. I didn't want any PFAS, forever chemicals, in the land. I didn't want any commercial agriculture. So I was looking for a piece of land that was very much agriculturally aligned and suitable. But at the same time, it wasn't commercially farmed in the last hundred years to potentially destroy the land.

53:36We also wanted to be in a good school district for our kids. We didn't want to be in the, you know, you can find some beautiful pieces of property that are in the middle of nowhere with no community and a really bad school district. So I was like trying to thread this needle. And so it took us over 12 months to find the property that we landed on. Were you just cow chopping during 12 months? We were Airbnb to Airbnb, dude. Dude, at one point we were living in the shopkeeper's apartment above a general store in a tiny little town in Vermont with fewer than 100 people. And were you still operating your company during all this?

54:10Still operating the company at the same time, trying to do all of this at once. But I had gotten myself out of hyper growth mode and kind of detaching myself from what was happening and creating a little bit of distance gave me this perspective. and you know we can talk numbers and i'm happy to to talk um share some numbers but but i think what happens and i've been in this world long enough that it does not matter what number you are at if you're at a 10 million dollar net worth a hundred million dollar net worth a billion dollar net worth there is this uh uh sense that a lot of people have not everybody but most of the people that I encounter that whatever number it is that you're at is not enough.

55:00I've heard it dozens, if not hundreds of times at this point, everyone I've talked to once they reach their number, I won't say everyone, there's exceptions. Most people always want more is the goalpost moves. You shoot for 10 million and now you want 12 and so on and so forth. Whatever you're at, it's like you can, there have been a lot of studies that I've read on this, that basically if you look at your salary or your take-home income that you make in a year, in a given year, and your net worth, the number is about 2X. It's like two in change. So if you're making like 200 grand a year, the number is like, man, if I can make 400 grand a year, I'd be happy.

55:38If you're at$10 million net worth, it's like, man, if I just could be a little bit, if I could be like 20 million net worth, I would be comfortable. And I'll tell you what, because I've been in rooms and I've been in groups and I'm part of organizations, with people at all of these levels, it does not change. There are guys, I mean, there's a very famous story when Ted Turner decided to give away a huge chunk of his money. And you and I maybe talked a little bit about this, where when he dipped below a billion dollars in terms of his net worth, he was like at 900 million and change. He went back to work.

56:13And he was asked in an interview, what happened? Why'd you go back to work? He's like, I just felt like things were getting a little tight. Like I just needed to get above a business in order to feel good. And so I've spent a lot of time studying this empirically and from afar and recognizing that it's never going to feel like enough. We're always going to want to squirrel away more acorns. That's just our biological imperative. It's our survival instinct to want to do that. So you have to kind of snap through that. You've got to use every ounce of your prefrontal cortex to be able to say, what I have now is enough to live the life that I want to live.

56:58And it's not like a one-time thing and then like the spell is cast. It is like every month of every year you need to fight against the current of I need more. I need more. Sometimes every day. I need more. Absolutely. Yeah. And so I had this moment where I asked myself, is what I have enough? And what I came to the conclusion of is I said, I don't know if this is enough forever, but it's certainly enough for now. And I made the decision that in this season of life, what I'm optimizing for is not maximizing net worth. It's not maximizing income. It's sucking the marrow out of this season of life, this so short season of life where I've got my two boys with me at home before they go off and become adults.

57:49And so every decision that I've made in business and life has been around maximizing that. And that has been a massive driver in what we call our family's grand adventure to start a farm on almost 150 acres where we raise cattle, we raise pigs, we raise meat chickens, turkeys. We've got laying hens for eggs. I've got 48 beehives on the property. We've got over a thousand maple syrup taps. We produce 100 % of our own protein, 100 % of our own sweetener, 100 % of our own fats on the property. We raise trouts. I've planted 500 fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes. I've got a multi-acre production garden where we grow everything from potatoes and carrots and onions and garlic to fresh greens and fresh herbs.

58:43We eat fresh throughout the year. We overwinter and overstore all of our root vegetables. I've got seven freezers in my basement filled with every form of protein you can imagine. And we've done this all as a family, which is the most rewarding part of all of it. That's so cool. You must have a staff, right? I mean, how does that operate? And what's the monthly cost to operate something of that scale? Yeah, I knew you were going to ask. I kind of prepared the numbers. So we are in season four of this journey, right? 2022 to 2026, the time of this conversation. And 50 % of the time we have had staff, 50 % of the time it's just been my immediate family.

59:32That's it. So we have a second cottage on the property that we've had someone full-time on the ground with us. And then we've also done without. So I've done it both ways. So I can speak from experience in terms of the pros and cons in doing both ways. The challenge that we have is that we are too large for a homestead to just be DIYing it, but also not quite big enough to have a commercially viable operation. Like having a very diversified homestead like this is not, you're not going to make profit selling meat and eggs at the farmer's market. So is the goal with all of this to profit or simply a sustainable lifestyle for you and your family?

1:00:14So it's definitely, I mean, it's both. Like I think anything, anytime you have a business, you've got to think about the lifestyle considerations. Like if your business is you are a professional speaker, you better love being on the road 250 days a year. Because you're going to be doing a heck of a lot of travel. If you want to run a software company, there's a whole other set of lifestyle considerations. So I think it's like really important to focus on what kind of lifestyle do you want to live and then reverse engineer what kind of business is going to allow you to do that. So for us, the way that we operate this farm as a business is we bring people here.

1:00:53And I run events for entrepreneurs, for business owners on the farm. And they're business events first and foremost, but they're also experiential. we do a full farm to table meals like true farm to table meals where everything that you're eating has been grown from the land uh we do there are a lot of people who are very interested in how do you select a piece of land um just the ins and outs of like running a homestead operation like this what are the costs associated in some of the questions that you're asking um so for us by far our biggest cost is the land itself. So we're at 150 acres. What does that cost?

1:01:34So we purchased the property for just under$5 million for the whole property. It's also, you know, our home's on the property. I feel like that's not bad for 150 acres. Is it a good price or is that pretty common? It's for, it is more than we wanted to spend. Okay, okay. But in order to get, and I did not need, nor did I necessarily want 150 acres. I was looking for something between 50 and 100 acres. Okay, so this is what I wanted when I was looking. Problem is what most people don't realize when you're looking for a piece of property is that you're not gonna find like the precise 50 acres that has everything that you want on it.

1:02:13Like, you know, 50.0 acres. You're gonna have extra stuff that, oh, it's more than what I needed and what I wanted. And, you know, but you're gonna have to make compromises somewhere. um so um when we bought the property we decided to put a uh about a two million dollar mortgage on the property okay and i had the three million cash i had the cash to buy it all in cash but for multiple reasons and this is like a this is not legal or tax planning or estate planning advice but um having a mortgage on a piece of property puts less a little bit less of a target from creditors and just people going after you because knowing that there's debt on the property and it's not free and clear, that can help you in certain ways.

1:03:00There's also the mathematical equation of like, all right, what would I do with the$2 million? Can I earn more than what I'd earn paying a mortgage? So we have a$2 million mortgage at 6.5 % on the property. and then we have about$50 ,000 in taxes at a reduced rate because most of our land is in what's called current use in the state of Vermont. So we pay a lower tax rate because we're not developing the land. We're using it for forestry and we're using it for agricultural purposes. So we pay a lot more than that if it was just market tax rate for the hundred, like if this was in town, for example, or in a developed area.

1:03:39So just those two numbers alone, um you know put the uh and i have the numbers in front of me because i know you're gonna um be curious to ask um that puts things at about around like 200 and change caught like 220 000 a year um just to like own the property own the property not yeah that's that's no livestock no livestock no equipment no maintenance um none of that so then quickly quickly walk me through all that? Because that's certainly a lot of numbers and even you, you know, pouting off some of the different numbers of how many things there are, or touting off some of the, you know, numbers of livestock and, and, you know, you have trees and you have plants and how do you get all those?

1:04:25I mean, what is that like to acquire and then what's the cost to upkeep it? And do you sell any of it? Or, I mean, what does that look like? Yeah. You know, so all said and done, if I look at my, I pulled this up knowing that you were going to ask, um, so I'll give you the actual numbers. I looked at our books for the last three years, just as a point of reference. In year one, we spent about$260 ,000 on equipment. Aside from land? Aside from land. Equipments, livestock, maintenance, fence installation, equipment, you know, so on and so forth. In the last two years, we've spent about$175 ,000.

1:05:07to basically - Each year or total? Each year. Okay. Yeah. So you're like four to 550 ,000 a year, give or take with property and then everything included. Is that pretty accurate? Yeah, that's, yes. And that includes labor in those numbers as well. Okay. So we've had seasonal labor, like part-time labor coming in to help. I've brought in consultants in some cases to help with like getting certain operations set up. And then I've had full-time labor on site. Again, for about half the time that we've been here. So it would be more if we, you know, have had full-time labor on the whole time. So it is not a way to eat more cheaply than - Yeah, I was gonna say free food costs a lot of money.

1:05:53Exactly. You know, but for me, it goes back to, you know, the experience that we've had as a family and what I've been able to teach my kids and what our boys have learned in the process, to me has been worth every dollar of tuition that we paid. Like they know how to rate - I mean, they're going to be entrepreneurs if they want to be. I mean, they know how to operate a business. They know how to grow their own food. They can sort of take whatever path they want and both ends of the spectrum and be okay. Absolutely. And along the way, we've also like my boys, they also invest in the stock market.

1:06:27They have real estate investments that they've learned how to make. They have their own business. They have a retail arbitrage business where they basically buy stuff locally at discount and then they sell it online on eBay and Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace and different outlets at a profit. So they're learning how to actually - Are they doing that because you are encouraging that or are they just like-minded and they want to be entrepreneurs even in their teens like you were? I think it starts at a very young age. You know, so when we were, um, when we were really young, when the boys were really young, we, uh, we've done a number of things.

1:07:09They've grown up around our business. So they've been involved in the business. You know, there's one point in our business where we were running big live in-person events. We'd have 500 to a thousand people coming into a room. Dad is teaching and presenting on stage. They would get to come on stage. They did get to experience the whole thing. Like this is going back to when they were, you know, one and three years old. So they've been in it the whole time. But I'll tell you one thing that every time I share what it is that we're doing here and I could, you know, I'll give you the brief version in this conversation.

1:07:40Typically, it inspires people wanting to know more. And for me, one of the things I'm really, really passionate about is what I describe as first gen, next gen. I'm a first generation multimillionaire. I'm a first generation college grad. And I believe that there are so many first generation parents and adults who are the ones who make it in their family lineage that are learning a lot along the way and don't necessarily have the guidance on how to keep that wealth and how to pass on not only that wealth, but the lessons on to the next generation. That's the next gen piece. And because I did not grow up with affluence, I grew up with a lot of hardship, financial hardship, and learned how to work really, really hard.

1:08:27I've been trying to instill that same work ethic and resilience in our boys, even though they potentially could grow up in a life of convenience and affluence that would remove a lot of that. So part of that has been chores at 6 a.m. every morning. You're learning how to do this stuff. Are they like milking cows and like cleaning out stables and stuff like that? It's animal chores every morning. Yeah. Every morning, we've got cows, we got pigs, We got chickens. We got turkeys and laying hens every morning. You have horses? Do you ride the horses around the property? We don't have horses ourselves, but we have horse trails on the property and all of our neighbors have horses.

1:09:04So we've got a lot of horse traffic where it is that we live. That's cool. But what I was going to say is at a young age, my plan was this. I said, I want these boys to learn the world of money. I want these boys to learn just like I did when I was 10 and 12 years old reading the books of Peter Lynch. So the curriculum that I started with them is that we started by reading aloud all the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books. We did it as a read aloud. We'd pass the book around. And when the boys were old enough to read, they'd read a page. We'd pass it along. Then we started playing the cash flow quadrant game for kids.

1:09:33Then when they graduated from that, we started playing the cash flow quadrant game for adults. Then they each got their own green light accounts, which allows them to trade stocks in the stock market. And then we would give them jobs, both in my company and on the farm more recently, that they earn money. They have to take a portion of that money and they have to invest it in the stock market. When they grew their investments big enough, just like in the cash flow quadrant game, they amassed enough money to make their first private real estate syndication deal in a cash flowing piece of real estate that pays them each about$300 to$400 a month in passive income from the cash flowing real estate investment that they've earned.

1:10:13Now they take a portion of that$400 a month and they put that back into the stock market to lather, rinse, repeat, and do it again. And so - I got two kids, four and two, and a third kid on the way. And I'm like, all right, let me get them involved early because this is just a life-changing stuff here. So perfect to do this. And so I wanted to get them to this place that whatever they do, because I've got one kid who's super math oriented. He's taught himself how to code in Java. He's brilliant at sort of cerebral aspects of life, maybe a little bit more absent-minded with stuff on the farm. And then I got another kid who's far more grounded, does really well with tangible work with his hands, is very gifted, also very relational.

1:10:54So he'll be great in business development or sales or politics or something like that. But maybe he's a little bit less sort of analytical and math oriented. and irrespective of whatever career paths they choose or businesses they choose, I wanted to arm them with the skills that they can earn a living. And if they want to start a farm, if they want to be an artist, or in my case, like I'm a farmer philosopher, I write books, like that's what I do. If they want to write books and that's how they want to live their one and precious life, one wild and precious life, I wanted to arm them with the skills to be able to do that.

1:11:29and so that's been a huge mission for me in this season of life is instead of maximizing earning instead of maximizing net worth it's been sucking the marrow out of this season of life and really instilling everything I can in these boys to be able to live incredible unique special lives what was your net worth when you decided this is enough you know when i kind of made that call you know and it's it's tough to give a precise number and anyone who gives a super precise number it's always like it's there's going to be a range because they're private assets that are fluctuating market assets change but if you had to give a number yeah you know my numbers probably somewhere between 30 and 35 million dollars in liquid net worth so that's not in tied up in company that's not tied up in valuation of a privately owned company.

1:12:22It's market securities, it's venture capital and private equity investments. And that's basically at basis is kind of how I like to value things. So if I put$2 million into a private equity fund, I'm valuing that at$2 million until we exit eight years later. It could be worth 1 million, highly unlikely. It could be worth 6 million. I'm keeping it at two for now. Okay. You know, so it's, you know, for me, it was like, well, what's the, I got into business, man. I'll tell you, when I was going back to the Scrabble Tile days, my someday maybe goal, like my dream at that time was if I can make$10 ,000 a month.

1:13:09Yeah, that's a life-changing amount of money. That's like the milestone a lot of people talk about in starting a business. It's like, dude, once you hit 10, you realize 100 is attainable. Well, the goalposts move, man. I mean, once I did 10, it's like, well, shit, we can do 20. And once you do 20, it's like we can do 100. And then once you do 100, you're like, I did like$100 ,000 in a day. And I was like, well, I'm going to do$100 ,000 in a day. Well, I just need 10 days. I can do like a million dollars in a month. You do a million dollars a month. And then before you know it, I've done webinars where I've made a million dollars on the webinar itself, like in a 90-minute period.

1:13:43And I know people have done far more than that. It's not a bragging thing. It's just more about you hit these numbers that you think are just so unattainable. And then what happens is, like I'm in a few of these investment groups for high net worth individuals. I've never been less money motivated in my life. And I know it's like super, like it can be like super cringe to hear that. Like, of course, man, like you've hit the number, but I can tell you that that's not always the case. You get in groups like this, again, at any number, whether it's$35 million net worth or$70 million net worth or$700 million net worth, there are a lot of people whose entire life is just how do I increase that number?

1:14:31And I always go back to the story of the Mexican fisherman. Like if I doubled my net worth tomorrow, what would I do? I'd be spending more time with my kids. I'd be writing. I'd live in nature. I'd be having interesting conversations with interesting people. I'd be traveling. I can do all of those things right now if I never earn another dollar for the rest of my life? So why would I be doing anything that doesn't, you know, fuel the soul? So when you don't have it, money feels like it's the only thing that you need. When you do have it, you start realizing that money doesn't give you what it is that you want.

1:15:09You feel like you need more time. And then you go down this path where you say, it's not just about the time, it's about meaning and fulfillment and giving back and spiritual awakening and all the things like this. And it's a, I mean, it's a predictable story. You know, by the time you figure it out, you're old and gray, if you're lucky. And you've hopefully lived a long and full life. And I feel like I'm just on that journey right now and very grateful for every second of it. Do you still operate your business now or is your business your lifestyle business? So this is the punchline. 2024, two years after I'd resigned to the fact that we're never gonna sell this company, I had this epiphany when I was on the farm.

1:15:49I am in the pastures and I'm following honeybees. I'm just kind of tracking like where they're going. And I come across this combination of flowers that I'd never seen in nature before that caused my heart to skip a beat. I came across yellow goldenrod and purple aster. And the reason why my heart skipped a beat is because in a book called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she writes about this combination of flower that these are two flowers that over centuries have co-evolved together because the combination of purple and yellow activates photoreceptors in honeybee's eyes that cause them to be attracted to that combination of flowers.

1:16:34So technically in nature, these are competitors, but in many ways, they've co-evolved to collaborate. And when I came across this, I had this epiphany and I thought, what if I reach out to my competitor? And I knew exactly who the person was. And I rushed home. I reached out to a friend who I knew was also connected to this competitor of mine. And I said, give me his number. I'm going to send him a message on WhatsApp. So I reached out to a man by the name of Daniel Priestley. And Daniel and I had been living these parallel lives. We built very similar companies, very similar businesses, very similar pieces of software.

1:17:15I'm based in the US. He's based in the UK. I send him this message on WhatsApp voice memo. And I say, Hey Daniel, I think you know who I am, Ryan Levesque. And I know we've kept a little bit of professional distance, but I have this crazy idea. Would you be open to chatting? Three months later, I'm on an airplane to London signing the sale of my company to his company and sold the company in the most unexpected way. And I never would have expected that that would of materialized. That's insane. Are you able to disclose what you personally made from that sale? So this is a sale that was, it was not a financial buyer.

1:17:55It was a strategic. So well, I can't, well, for two reasons, I can't reveal exactly what the value of the transaction is. Number one, because a significant portion of it, as in most strategic sales is in stock in the newly combined company, which has not yet sold. So I place$0 value on my balance sheet, just having the last two deals now. So that could be worth tens of millions of dollars. It could be worth$0.00. And then a low seven figure cash payout over time from the residual sales of the revenue that we brought to the business. But for me - So you're no longer operating that at all, like no mental power.

1:18:48Most importantly is exactly what you just said. It gave me, number one, it gave what was really important to me is number one, I wanted to give a great landing spot for our customers. I wanted our customers to be really, really well taken care of. And Daniel and Steven, his partner, and the team have done a great job of that. That's number one. I wanted a great landing spot for my team members, for our employees. And in any transaction like this, there's not going to be space for everybody. But I pride myself on the fact that everybody who did not have a role in the newly combined company, we helped land a really great opportunity in some way, shape or form with my personal network, with my professional network to take care of everyone involved in the business.

1:19:31And that was super, super, super important to me, well beyond maximizing whatever I personally would have walked away from. Because I'll tell you, man, you know, they say life is short, but life is long. And when you've been in business, I've been in business almost 20 years now. And I find that there are people that I've known for the almost 20 years that I've been in business that I'm still doing stuff with. I'm still working with. They come back there. I see their name, you know, buying a copy of my most recent book that I just literally just wrote. And it puts a smile on my face because it tells me that, you know, while my record hasn't been perfect, and I'm sure there's some people watching this saying, oh, Ryan's a total asshole and, you know, he can go to hell.

1:20:14Hopefully not. But I think for the most part, I've tried to do the right thing and do right by people. And I think that's worth far more than, you know, an extra million dollars in the bank. Yeah, I think your story is inspiring because I'm a family man. And so I resonate with anyone who, you know, chooses to be present, particularly in the formative years. What do you think about your net worth and your money in, you know, once you're gone? I mean, how are you thinking about legacy and a trust maybe or passing on that to your children? Or maybe not? It's a great question. So I think money is a tool.

1:20:58Money is a tool. And I am in this interesting phase of life right now where my kids are still young. They're not, the brownies are not fully baked. like the dough is still warm and soft and a little bit gooey in places and so i don't know exactly who these kids are going to become how they're going to turn out what their values are going to be my wife and i have worked really hard to instill our family values we have family meetings we spent a lot of time talking about things i literally just got back yesterday from a rites of passage trip with my younger son in the idaho wilderness where we spent a week living in the wild building our own shelter, going through this rite of passage from boyhood to manhood as he just turns 12 years old.

1:21:47You know, so we've worked really hard to build this very intentional life. But I'm human and I've, you know, said things that I regret and I've said hurtful things to my children and to my wife and to my parents and to the people that I love. And I've done hurtful things. And so you just don't know. You try to do the best you can, but I've made mistakes along the way. So when it comes to money, I think about what it is that my wife and I want to do through the rest of our lives. And I'm in a season of life now where I am making decisions that are not based on how much money is this going to make, but what level of meaning and fulfillment and contribution is this going to provide.

1:22:35and i think about like who i want to be um and i think about um what level of wealth i want to pass on to our children so like for example my my we spend talk about where we spend our money um so i think this is probably an interesting conversation um we uh the second biggest line item uh beyond the farm we spend about 120 000 a year in private school tuition for our two boys And that will go up to about - Each or is that total? That's total right now. And that will go up to about$170 ,000 a year when my younger son, not adjusted for inflation, enters high school. So my older son is at boarding school right now, which costs over$80 ,000 a year.

1:23:22It's between 80 and$90 ,000 a year. Residential boarding school or they travel to and fro? Like true boarding school, like sleeping, living. um you know and he just he just turned um he just entered they call it third form but ninth ninth grade um so he just entered um the equivalent of ninth grade and um like that's a place where i'm taking money that i've earmarked for these boys that i could wait until they're much older in life and distribute to them but i'll spend you know for for my son who go to four years of of a boarding school. He'll go to four years of undergrad. Just that alone, eight times almost $90 ,000 a year equivalent is almost$800 ,000.

1:24:07Just that alone, times two kids. So I believe in using wealth in these ways. Probably we'll have an amount of money available to get a business started if they each decide to start a business or go into business for themselves. Um, you know, and so like that is kind of my philosophy. Um, I want to give them, uh, enough of a headstart that they can, um, do certain things that I think will fast track the process, but at the same time, not remove the friction and adversity that I certainly faced as a, you know, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but I definitely didn't have$800 ,000, you know, handed to me.

1:24:54But my parents did make a lot of sacrifices to allow me to do the things that I was able to do. And, you know, had I grown up in a, you know, in a village in sub-Saharan Africa with, you know, no electricity and no running water, you and I would not be having this conversation. So I think it's like a balance of like, how much of a leg up do you want to provide whilst at the same time instilling the values of perseverance and resilience and courage and grit and overcoming adversity. So that's kind of what I'm thinking. In terms of the exact dollar amounts, I haven't decided on what that is. And frankly, anybody who knows that number now, and it's like a static number, I think is probably kidding themselves.

1:25:34Unless they're like 85 years old. Yeah, exactly. You know, because I think it's, you know, the world changes, people change, circumstances change. And so that's philosophically how we're thinking about things. I like that a lot. And it seems like even the boarding school investment is very much in line with why you're spending money on a farm and some of the different lifestyle decisions you've made. That is really where you're investing in your wealth. Where else are you spending? You know, you have the house and you have all the farm and everything that comes with that boarding school. What are some other line items on your monthly nut?

1:26:09Well, you know, the biggest ones, I think, generally speaking, travel is always the biggest line item. So literally, like 10 minutes before you and I hopped on this conversation, my wife and I have been planning out a trip for this coming summer. We're going to spend most of the summer in Europe. and I wanted to make that trip as long as possible because they're just not, when your kids are at two different schools, like your kids are too young right now, but when they're a little bit older, if they start going into different schools, school breaks are no longer aligned. So there's only two times each year.

1:26:46Painfully aware of that future reality. Yeah, like we've got a month at Christmas and summer. Every other short break, like one kid is off in March, another kid's off in April. Another kid's off in October, another one's off in November. It's like they don't line up. So you've got to take one of the kids out of school or you try to line things up. So I think we're going to be somewhere between I think around seven weeks is what we're able to do this summer that we're going to spend in Europe. And that's going to be, you know, a very co-created experience where we've got the container, we've got the ends sort of mapped out.

1:27:22But what we do within that from a cultural perspective, an educational perspective, business perspective, a contribution perspective. So probably incorporating some type of charitable aspect to it and doing some work while we're abroad and perhaps, you know, helping some, you know, some underserved groups in the places that we travel to. Like I want to incorporate all of that into the experience. There's a bit of giving back, a bit of learning, a bit of fun, of course. And is that altruism or philanthropic or faith-based? I mean, why give back? I feel like, dude, I mean, we got, I feel like this is me.

1:28:02You know, I'm not the moral arbiter of what's right and wrong. I'll just say that. It's my personal value system. I feel like if you're listening to this podcast right now or this conversation or this show, nevermind being on it, we got dealt a pretty good hand. and I just feel a responsibility to give back in whatever ways we can. Like if you think about all the people in your life and in your lineage that made sacrifices to be where you are in this moment. My grandfather was a paratrooper who we're just teaching our kids about this. He's a World War II veteran. He's long since passed. He jumped on D-Day in the Battle of the Bulge and he fought for freedom.

1:28:51And he lived through that. Most of his friends did not live through D-Day. And I think about the sacrifices that he made. I think the sacrifices that his father made, my great grandfather as an immigrant into this country. And we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Like the idea that any of us is self-made is just, I feel like very shallow and narrow in view. and I think about like to honor those who came before us, the sacrifices that they made to help us get to this point in the life that we get to live. I feel a moral obligation to give back to the people and to the planet for helping to create this life that we get to live.

1:29:36Yeah, no, I think it's inspiring whether or not it's moral arboration or if you're the moral arbiter, I don't know how to say that in the past tense, but no, I think that's inspiring. I think a lot of the listeners resonate with that. And I think particularly the ultra high net worth individuals are all typically interested in trying to figure out where to spend their money that is morally aligned. So I like that a lot. Even if you just want to feel good, like all altruism ultimately, and this is hard for I think a lot of people to swallow, comes from a very selfish place. It does. Interesting.

1:30:09Okay, philosopher. You said it earlier. That was the most philosophical thing you've said so far. At the core, everything we do, every decision we make in our life is ultimately designed to make us feel good about ourselves. Yeah. Full stop. You're not wrong. That's the biology. If you look at the neurochemistry, again, my background's in neuroscience. If you look at the neurochemistry behind what is actually happening in our body and in our brain, it's designed to make us feel good. And altruism is something that makes us feel good about ourselves because we feel like we're part of the greater good.

1:30:43We feel like we're part of a greater whole. We feel like we're part of something that's bigger than who we are. So it does come from a selfish place. But I believe you can do things that are selfish, that are also for the good of humanity and the good of those around us. So, you know, you can make yourself feel better about yourself by gambling and, you know, giving into vices and addictions. Or you can make yourself feel good about yourself by giving rather than receiving. And we all know it feels infinitely better to give a gift than it does to receive that gift. And so to the extent that we can give our gifts, we're going to just feel better and better.

1:31:22I agree. Ryan, I mean, you are an incredible storyteller. I appreciate you really carrying the weight of this episode. I was just engaged the whole time. And I think a lot of our listeners are going to be as well. Man, thank you for joining Money Wise. I mean, this is a fairly unique episode in that, of course, we touched on money and spending and wealth, but really it's more about your life beyond that, which is just interesting. You're a fascinating person. Your story is filled with challenge and triumph. And I'm grateful just to hear you speak it off and for me to be able to listen to it today on Money Wise.

1:31:59So I really appreciate you joining. It's been an honor to be able to share, man. I'm really grateful for the opportunity and it's been a lot of fun. Thanks, Ryan.

1:32:36The question he asked himself after the$70 million deal fell apart is the one that I'm keeping close to my head, close to my heart. If it had closed, what would he have even done with the money? Move the family to nature and start a farm. So his thought was, well, what's stopping him from doing that right now? And it was nothing. He already had it. A lot of people I talk to about their wealth have money, but are still chasing the life. They don't always know exactly what to do with the money that they have now, now that they've amassed this life-changing amount of money. The goalpost moves and they always continue to want more and more.

1:33:08Ryan put it so beautifully, whatever you're at, the number in your head is going to just be more. In his case, he always said a lot of the people just want two times, double. The farm cost him about half a million a year and free food is expensive, ironically. He'd tell you he's buying 6am chores with his sons before they leave the house and it's the cheapest tuition he's ever paid. What's interesting about Ryan's story is he just completely reframed the way that he was living his life and chasing these opportunities and chasing what he determined was the life that he valued. I think one of the reasons Ryan is such an engaging storyteller is because he looks at life and picks apart the pieces that just don't matter to him and he capitalizes on all the different things that are important to him and he goes all in on those things.

1:33:56If you're listening to this episode and you're wondering, well now that I have money, what do I do with my life? Or maybe you haven't made the amount of money that you've been chasing and you're still aiming for that final goal. My encouragement to you is this, figure out what you're optimizing your life for and start living that life right now as much as you can. A lot of people get stuck in this cycle of I need two times more, I need 10 times more, and they're just never happy. Ryan flipped the script on his life and said, if I'm chasing the life of living on 150 acre farm, sourcing my own food, spending time with my family.

1:34:31If that's the life I want, then let me just start it right now. And I think for a lot of you listening, and certainly for me, that resonates a lot. Money tends to provide freedom, but in many cases, as we're chasing freedom from money, we actually find ourselves trapped by money. And ironically, in chasing freedom, we become imprisoned to the one thing that can provide freedom if we plan correctly and if we have the right outlook on life. So this is one of those episodes that's probably going to stick with me for a really long time. And if it's an episode that's going to stick with you as well, go ahead and drop a comment.

1:35:01Subscribe if you haven't already and make sure to tune in next week on Money Wise. Thank you so much for listening.