How Ecommerce Founders Get Rich: Exits, Dividends, Debt & Salary

19:47You're wearing this operator hat and you're wearing this shareholder hat. And even though we think about those two like working together, often what the shareholder wants and what the operator wants are kind of different things. For example, the operator, they want as much working capital as they can possibly get because working capital is money that they can play with to buy inventory and hire employees and things like that. When you're wearing the owner hat, you want distributions. You want cash flow flowing out of the entity. And so my hottest take here and something that I have not been a good, I've not done well and learned from my mistakes is that demand when you're wearing the shareholder hat, demand that the business, that the asset produces a certain amount of cash flow.

20:30And that will create a constraint that will actually make your management better at using the working capital that they have. If you just go to management and say, hey, how much working capital do you need? They'll eat all of it. They'll say, I want all of it. I want 100 % of the cash flow after taxes. But then they'll do more dubious investments with it. If instead you say, hey, I'm getting 20 % of EBITDA. I'm getting 25 % of EBITDA. You guys get the other 25 % of EBITDA to invest. However, what you're really doing is creating a constraint. You're raising the bar of any investments that they make and you're going to get a better return.

21:05So ironically, the worst thing that I've ever done is given too much of my cashflow to reinvestment, you think, well, like, hey, that you're gonna get a bigger business, you're gonna get better performance. Not necessarily, because a lot of times what it does is it adds all these extra projects to the organization that aren't generating a return, increases inefficiency, increases headaches, and you've got no money in your account. So set, make sure that you're spending some time with the shareholder hat on and set high standards for the cashflow that's going to come out of the entity. it'll actually help your management team do a better job.

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22:37Sean Frank:Dude, you're getting claps. All right, Mike, well, since you're on a roll, dude, you actually have the third way to make money in e-commerce. Do not say, hey, Mike on the operators said that I should take out debt so that I can get more money in my bank account. Never say that. That's not what's happening here. However, the third way is that sometimes you can make more money, get more money out of the company by taking on debt. And there are people that do this. I think the most common way that you'll see this done is called a dividend recap. Basically, what this is, is you have an asset. It has pretty predictable cash flow.

23:12Banks love lending money on predictable cash flow. It's why they love real estate. And when banks see one of these, they're like, wouldn't it be great if we use debt to help you go ahead and pull forward, kind of like a payday loan, go ahead and pull forward your earnings from the future and have that now so that you can fly around on jets and things like that. you to get one of these you really have to be at a certain type of scale and a certain type of stability that is difficult for most e-commerce businesses to ever achieve we know people we have friends that have done these and it's been successful so it's important to say like this is an option but it's also like you need to be at a level of stability for this to be wise that is very rare.

23:56Like I tweeted about this yesterday, but I've been around for 17 years. I can't even count the number of businesses I've been involved in or that I've watched that have had success. And it just seems like they're going to be up into the right forever and they're extinct. It happens all the time. The other version of this is just taking on debt. When you're taking on debt in your company, what you're doing is you're exogenously adding capital to try and grow faster and to try and make more money. But debt has an interest rate. And what we see a lot in the community is that the type of debt that people have access to in the e-commerce community is usually debt with like a 15 % interest rate or 20 % interest rate.

24:39And it is very difficult. My advice to people is it is very difficult to make that make sense because what you think about is like, okay, for your business to do well, let's say you've got to earn a 50 % return on your invested capital. Let's just throw that number out there. That's pretty high. You know, like the market, you're trying to do 10 or 15%. You're saying, hey, in my business, I can invest money at 50%. Well, if you had 20 % debt to try and grow faster, now you got to grow at 70%. You got to achieve a 70 % return on your capital. And that's just a very high bar. So you can juice things.

25:13I mean, like debt is like the HGH of the e-commerce world. If you want to get bigger, faster, stronger, faster, you can use it, but you also can wreck your body doing it. You can wreck your business doing it. So it just needs to be used very intelligently. And you need to be really clear eyed about when it's the right move for your business.

25:34Matt Bertulli:When you say use debt to pull out more money, is this a way to address what Sean raised or somebody raised around like working capital? So like if the business makes 5 million in EBITDA, but you need a lot of working capital in the business, but you want to pull out the 5 million in EBITDA, it's like, well, I'm going to use debt now instead of? Practically an example of where you need working capital for non-inventory reasons is when you start selling to wholesale customers, because wholesale customers are going to put you on terms. They're going to be on net 30, net 60, net 90. And there's a lot of money that can get tied up there, right?

26:05Like I don't even know how much money we have on receivables with Amazon, Walmart, Target combined, but it's probably, you know, a healthy eight figure number. And so this would actually be one of the ways where there are banks that love to lend against that and if i have to fund all of that out of cash flow then i i you know that's years of distributions that that go away but if i'm factoring my receivables and all of a sudden that money's on the table and so that would probably be the most practical way where debt makes a ton of sense you factor receivables from your wholesale customers so that it doesn't eat into you know the cash flow from your ebitda and you can actually distribute money because i i think then

26:42Matt Bertulli:the other way that what you might be hitting on is you actually borrow explicitly for the, like some multiple of EBITDA that a bank will lend against because you're consistent. So let's say they give you like, let's say you have 10 million EBITDA. There are lenders who would say like, we'll give you a two X, like we'll give you two turns on your EBITDA to do a dividend recap. Right. That's the, that's the thing that like, I know many of our friends do this and they do it like every two or three years, right? And one of the reasons to do this, I don't know if Sean or Curtis, you're gonna hit on this, is it is actually tax efficient to do this.

27:18Matt Bertulli:Because then the debt, the tax, sorry, the interest on the debt is tax deductible for the business. The business is gonna have now another expense that they get to deduct against their taxes. So depending on the debt load and how consistent the cash flows are, people play this game. I'm not saying you should do it. I'm with Mike. This is not a recommendation. from this pod to do this.

27:39Sean Frank:You know, Matt, you say people. His name's Jason. He's on the podcast sometimes. I'm trying not to name names. The I in EBITDA is interest. So there is a tax shield to it. But Curtis, I want to hear your overall take on the third way to make money and your relationship with debt. I think that we spend 99 % of our time figuring out how we would sell the company one day. We don't spend equal time saying, I mean, you would very brilliantly said, hey, Grooms built it backwards. They said, hey, how do we need to do that? If you actually spent a couple years in your company saying, hey, I want to take some good money out by going by debt, and your company is growing, and you've got 10 million EBITDA, and you can take out 20 million, that's great.

28:23Because over three years, you're paying a low interest rate, and now your company is going to be at 25 million EBITDA. So you can take out more or get it ready for a buy. If someone's buying your company, they're not paying all cash. They're going to take debt out on your company just like you would anyhow, right? They're already doing that. They might write a$100 million check, but they're taking another$100 million, and they're taking the debt out because your company is sound enough to do that. So you're saying, hey, I'll keep the company, and I'll just take the$50,$60,$70 million worth of debt.

28:58So thank you. It only came into my mind because I was running that math. I'm like, wait a second. It never occurred to me to do this until I heard on this podcast everybody talking about doing this. But I never took enough time to really look into it. I think if I had had my accountants take the time that I spent and my lawyers spend the time in doing that that I would in selling the company, I may have come up with some ways and ideas of saying, hey, next year I think we'll be here. I think this would be a smart way to take this out. I think I retained my equity. My growth over the next four years is going to pay for that because my growth is more valuable than the interest rate that I'm paying.

29:40And I take that money out, I'm going to grow because I'm going to double the company in the next two to three years, right? Everybody out there, if you're not thinking that, don't take out debt. If you're not very profitable, very good at this, and you're not growing, don't take out debt. But if you are, you should look into this just as hard as you're looking into selling your company.

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30:32Matt Bertulli:So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out. Another way to put what you said, Curtis, is And what Mike is saying is you're going to use debt to buy your company from yourself. So like if you're comfortable with a private equity group coming in and putting debt on your business and you're, cause like ultimately you're also not going home. So let's be honest.

31:04Matt Bertulli:Like, you know, Sean said, like Chad sold for a billion dollars. Chad still has a job, right? Like, so when you, when you get acquired, you are likely in some kind of earn out or some kind of like situation where you're going to be working for a while. And the buyer has likely put the debt on your business too. So if both of those things are true, then there is an argument to say, well, then maybe you should just buy it from yourself at better terms, right? Like, and now there's, now you're still the boss. If you believe, if you believe in your company.

31:37Sean Frank:This was a riveting debt debate. I actually thought it was going to be a more, more one-sided, but this is, this is great to hear. Curtis is coming back for the debt v. debt episode that's going to drop pretty soon, so I'm excited for that. Curtis, what is the most boring way to make money out of e-commerce? You're running your business. Do you have like a really bland way to do it? I've got so many bland things in my damn life. You just, I'm a weirdo, okay? I really am. And so I actually pay myself an amount of money in a salary every year. and I take that freaking money and I live on it. And that's half of what I do.

32:23I'm not even in the top five people that get paid in my company, by the way. I'm not even in the top five. So I don't take out huge amounts. I could take out more. But the other side of this is I have done something with my salary is I love what I'm doing. This is my life. I create companies and relationships and people and I grow and I build this thing. So I created my life around this, right? When I'm flying someplace, I am not going to Disney World. I'm going to New York to go to a D2C conference to meet Sean, to tell him to tell me, hey, here's some good ideas on what you can do with your life and your business.

33:06Everything I do is business. So in essence, I don't have a lot of bills because they're business expenses. I hire all my favorite people in the entire world and we do things together. I bought my house down here in Mexico because this is work. Now, I don't own a car, but I have a driver pick me up every day and drive me to work. I live a really good life. I go out to really great dinners. I live fantastically. The salary is a little bit, but I created the light around my company. And so what the hell else do you want in this world other than to do that. Should you pay yourself more than I do? Yes.

33:48I had to set up a trust several years ago for the company. And someone said, if you die, you're screwed. Your 89-year-old mother is going to own your company and you're going to own 80 million in tax, right? Like, set up a trust. And when the trust attorney said, other than your home and your cars, what do you own that's worth more than$1 ,000? And I said, zero. not a single thing so that intervention you're talking about mike we may need to have that because i built my life on the passion of what i want to do and what i want to do is hang out with great people and build great companies and do awesome things and those are the same things and that's what my company does so what else am i looking for why am i going to this world i'll be bored it is the whole point of the episode curtis is that i think you're an example of like, you probably did all the right things, but you're getting a great outcome because you created a great company.

34:46But the point of the episode, I think, is that in e-commerce, that's not what happens most of the time. Most of the time, the passion project, you do it for five years and there is no money at the end of it. And so like, how do you actually get money by doing the work that we're doing? And I think that what you're saying is really the point, which is like, you have to take a salary. You have to take a market salary. you have to get a business to the point where it can pay you a market salary. I mean, I think the first several years of Simple Modern, I think my salary was$100 ,000. And I viewed this as like a badge of honor, like I'm willing to take less money or whatever, and I'm willing to pay other people at my company more.

35:29But it's just bad governance. It's just foolishness, really. Like, I need to take what I'm worth in the market for like five reasons. One of them being, if I go away, if I get hit by a car, the business needs to be able to afford to rehire my replacement. And like the biggest concept that I've learned is that your personal balance, when you own an e-commerce company, when you own a company in general, your personal balance sheet and the company's balance sheet are basically the same thing. So like if Simple Modern gets into financial distress, guess who's having to put money in? Me. If I get into financial distress, where am I going to look to bail me out?

36:08Simple Modern. And so like I have to run a strong personal balance sheet in order to have a strong company and I have to run strong company balance sheet to have a strong personal balance sheet. So like the thing that it took me probably six years to do was like, hey, let's go out there and figure out what my market comp should be and I will take it and I won't feel bad about taking it. And that's probably my biggest piece of advice to people is like, until you're paying yourself a market salary, you shouldn't be thinking about expansion and adding more people or, you know, distributions or anything else like the very, very top of the waterfall is, are you paying yourself what you're worth, what you could get if you went and got another job, how much it would cost to hire a replacement?

36:55Do that first before any of this other stuff matters. Sean. Did you bring me on here to tell people what not to do? Is that why I'm the guest on here today?

37:04Sean Frank:No, no, it's good to have different opinions because Mike's out here being like, look, pay yourself a market rate salary, and Curtis is apparently working for minimum wage. So it just depends on who you ask. Curtis is getting paid in pinatas. He earned eight pinatas last month, and he's very happy. When you said$100 ,000 in your first two years, I think my first seven years, I didn't pay myself. For seven years, I didn't pay myself$100 ,000. You guys say that? Curtis is an audience favorite for this reason. Because a lot of the audience is exactly where Curtis is. They're putting every dollar into this business.

37:38Sean Frank:They believe it. They're scaling it up. And that's why it's great to have different opinions on here. Everyone on this podcast runs a nine-figure successful business, and there's a million ways to do it.

37:46Matt Bertulli:So can I, I'm sure you saw it before you go on, though. Can I hit on one thing that Curtis said that I think is just going to fly by without mentioning it? Please. Curtis, and I think everybody does this. Every company probably does this. One of the things that you also realize when you sell your company is that your company was paying for a lot of your life. It just was all your travel, a lot of your, like a lot of stuff, like Curtis's driver is probably being paid for by PLG, right? In his role. So another way, like when you're talking about salary, you're also getting a lot of money out of your business by just having the business.

38:24Matt Bertulli:It's so intertwined that the business is likely also paying for some of your life. One of the sneaky ways that that's true, Matt, is that the business is giving you something to do with your time other than spend money. This is like real. Like when you talk to the people that sell their companies, like one of the reasons why they start to get freaked out about cash flow is it's like, what happens when instead of working 50 hours a week, you're just hanging out with a bunch of money in your bank account, you are spending. And so it is a very good point that part of what we do with our jobs is all of these ancillary benefits and the fact that it gives us something meaningful to work on other than spending money.

39:03And I do that. I literally woke up this morning and one of the little ad things that came into my thing was heritage auctions. And my favorite movie of all climb as the Big Lebowski. Yeah, and I love the Big Lebowski, right? They're selling the rug that they peed on at the beginning of the Big Lebowski, the rug that tied the room together. You know what I'm talking about?

39:26Matt Bertulli:Yeah, yeah. Do you feel compelled to buy this rug? Yes, you can buy the rug. It's on auction tomorrow. And I'm like, it's only at$100 ,000. That's fantastic. Curtis, your personal finances, books will be written about your personal finances. What we have learned so far, just to recap, is that you've never taken any distributions. You intentionally pay yourself a low salary. And then you spend$100 ,000 on a rug that a dog peed on in a movie. That is amazing. You haven't even mentioned Diane Keaton's hat. I've not seen the movie, Mike. No, I haven't. But Diane Keaton's, was it her hat or her scarf?

40:04You told me, the last time I talked to you, you were telling me about another piece of memorabilia. Tie from Annie Hall at an auction in New York.

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40:51Sean Frank:Claude plus BigQuery isn't enough. It needs your context. Get it at the link in show notes or go to saracenalytics.com to learn more. Okay, a lot to unpack there. A lot of cool stuff going on. Curtis, let me know if you buy the rug. Matt, you have a fifth way to make money and it's going to tie into all the random ways we can make money later on.

41:10Matt Bertulli:We're going to random ways, but it is actually common. Common right now is that you have founders who own an agency or a service business and a brand. So they have one thing that cash flows while they're building up the brand. And I think the view there is cash flow and equity, right? So the brand is probably their equity exit play and the agency or service business is likely where they get cash flow.

41:35Sean Frank:So Matt is saying work two jobs. He said e-commerce is so hard. You have to work two jobs sometimes. Look, I think that's going to kind of tie into like all of the weird ways you can make money in e-commerce because, you know, this is not for the faint of heart, this industry, right? You know, we're all here. This is blue collar internet work, right? Like we are out here trying to sell widgets and turn a profit every single day. You're battling meta. You're battling UPS. You're battling everybody. at the end of the day, you might have a small nugget of money left over. And then maybe you can distribute 20 % of that.

42:12Sean Frank:That's what we're talking about here. So we went through, you could sell your asset. We're all building assets and somebody will maybe want to buy that one day. If you don't want to sell your asset, you can just run the thing, cashflow it, take out distributions just through normal operations. The third thing is if that isn't enough money for you, you can throw debt on the business and you can take two, four, maybe five years of distributions up front right now with debt if your business is growing fast enough. And if all else fails, you can make minimum wage, pay yourself a salary, right? And if that isn't enough, and if you have free time, you can launch another business and you can run an agency and build something that actually cash flows while you try to have this long-term equity bet.

42:53Sean Frank:And I put that in this weird bucket where we're gonna go through all of the random ways to make money. And Matt, do you wanna take one of those too?

42:59Matt Bertulli:Let's start with what we see often. I've never actually done this, although I think it's a, that's interesting, is like referrals and kickbacks. So like if you are well-networked and you're a good operator, there's lots of agencies and SaaS companies that would happily pay you some kind of kickback if you refer them business.

43:19Sean Frank:I put this as a gray hat or black hat thing to do. I will tell you, I've never made money off an intro to anybody, but I am sure people have made money off of intros to me, so. I don't do it because it sounds like a lot of work too. I make money off intro pink to you, Sean. I send you people. Sean pays Mike. He doesn't go the other way though. It's a tough world out there. However, people want to make money, right? If you don't want to run an agency business, you could just be a referral partner. But yeah, not a way I've made money. You can intro agencies. You can intro software. You can intro credit card programs.

43:51Sean Frank:Like if anyone's ever hitting you up in your DMs, trying to get you to sign up for something, just understand they're probably getting monetized. But let's talk about a fun one. Mike, you want to take credit card points? Well, actually, the one I want to take, I want to take the investment one. Why don't you ask that question again to somebody else? Because we don't do as many of the credit card points, especially, yeah. Who likes credit card points here? Okay, Curtis.

44:16Matt Bertulli:Curtis, obviously. How do you think he's going to buy the rug?

44:19Sean Frank:Yeah, Curtis. Okay, let's talk about a fun one, credit card points. How are you really paying for that driver? Is it all credit card points? No, but there's always a great story on this. So when I started this and we're only in like a 2 ,000 square foot room and there's like 20 of us, there's a young lady is kind of helping me like a partner in a way, although I owned everything. And she set up the credit cards and she's like, yeah, I'm getting a couple of points. My husband and I are going to get these points. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't mean anything. That's great. Go ahead and take those points.

44:51I don't care about that. Never looked up for like four or five years. And then she's like, I'm really, my account, my CFO says, hey, we hired, we're going to take those back. We're putting them back in the company. She doesn't get those. And she came to me and she said, you know, I made$800 ,000 last year. I'm like, what? She's like, with the credit card points and my salary, like I've had, I mean, the last two years is$800 ,000 and$800 ,000. I think I should make more this year. I'm like, what are you talking about? Never even paid attention. shit. Now, see, here's the thing, guys. You can be smart in little ways and stupid in other ways.

45:31So I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We, when we needed it several years ago, we put those credit card points back in the company just for cash flow. And then the last couple of years, they go into some account, some money that I put somewhere. I don't know where it's at, but I get all that money.

45:46Sean Frank:That's so funny. Just like the human nature of it is instead of just shutting up and just accepting a good thing happened to you, to come back and ask for more. That is such human nature. It's like, well, I made 800 last year. I think I should make a million this year. And it's like, no. That's what they said. Nobody here makes a million. I was in the 150 range at the time. Yeah, yeah. I'm about 100, 150 at the time. Yeah. Dude, hilarious. Okay. You know. Poor Mike. Mike is such young. He's in such good shape. and he's going to have an aneurysm listening to how I run my business. No, you're just the most singular person I've ever met, Curtis.

46:25I love, I love you. You bring so much sunshine into my life.

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47:09Sean Frank:Another great one, and Matt, I'm going to go with you for this, is be a mentor. I think you actively do this and you should talk about it. I do.

47:19Matt Bertulli:There's three ways to look at this. So like you, Sean, I'll get on for free, like 15 to 20 minute calls with people, get a lot of requests like, hey, can you jump on or do this? I do that. I don't do any pay for hourly type things like mentor pass and stuff like that, those platforms. I don't do that because time is really precious. What I will do, and I've been doing this for about 10, 11 years, is I will actually engage in like advisory, like ongoing advisory work with founders if I think I can be helpful. So like get on a call every couple of weeks, work on the business together, like actually get in the weeds with people.

48:02Matt Bertulli:I don't do it as much for cash as I do because it's just fun. It gets the most fun. It's like you just get to play with other people's companies and it's just like the best time. and that might just be that my last company was also a service business so i like being in a lot of places it's like the adhd brain um but dude i like it's a great business like you can make a lot of money doing it um i constrain myself sean i don't i think i have like four people i do this with at any one time so it's a very small part of my calendar um but it's a way to do it like if you're valuable like i think cody's considering this now that he's retired right like it is absolutely it's a very valuable thing you can do for other brands dude for sure

48:44Sean Frank:and uh you know i don't think there's any shame in helping people with your with your knowledge

48:48Matt Bertulli:and expertise you can have such impact on people's lives like man i helped the guy sell his company recently i feel great he made a hundred million dollars like i am so happy that that that was

48:59Sean Frank:like i had a small part in that i'm like it's awesome work for sure um you know and in similar of the same vein is being paid to be on board seats. Oh, yeah. Like, I get asked to be on boards all the time, and the ask to be on a board is they give you equity in the business or$50 ,000 a year or whatever, because there's a time commitment, there's a travel commitment, the whole thing, right? So that's, I think, underexplored and under-talked about is that every company has to have a board, and you typically want somebody who's independent to be on there, and they want expertise. So it wouldn't surprise me if Mike's on 10 boards by next year.

49:35Sean Frank:So Mike, what's another weird way to make money in e-commerce? So one of the things we haven't talked about is that you have more risk when all of your eggs are in one basket. And the problem with owning a business in general, especially an e-commerce business, is that you've just got a fairly risky asset and you have almost all of your net worth tied up in it. So not only should you be trying to get money out of the business, whether it's salary, distributions, anything we talked about, but you need to be diversifying. This is another thing I did a terrible job at. I'm like, why do I need to diversify?

50:08My e-commerce companies are going to go to the moon. You need to do it. One of the ways that I wish I had done it is over the years, as you're building companies, you become acutely aware of who has a really, really good company moat, for example, like it became obvious pretty early on to me that Amazon was going to win in e-commerce. And it's probably depressing if I went back and did the math of if I'd never built any companies and I just put all the money in Amazon stock, how would I have done? I would have done really well, you know, like or I remember I remember before Shopify was a thing, like if you got in on the Shopify IPO, you crushed it.

50:52Why didn't I? Because of idiocy. Another example, I remember in the early days, our tech team was like, man, we're using this new tool, Datadog. Like, you know, we have to have it. We got on Jira, like that's Atlassian. Have to have it. They had several different software tools that we were using where it was like, hey, we've got to have these. Nobody else really does what this company does. Again, if I just kind of like anything that felt that way, like we've got to have it. If I just put money in that stock, I would have done awesome. And I would have been more diversified in the process. And so that's probably my recommendation is that when you're operating, you actually have an up-close view of who the best investments are going to be and you should monetize that.

51:38Great example, yesterday. This just happened yesterday. We had a company meeting and different departments were presenting and the accounting department presented. And the thing they're the most excited about is something that Ramp just rolled out. And I'm like, man, that is like a neon flashing sign. If like if you can get money in Ramp, you probably should, because my team is like, we've looked at all the options. This is awesome. This changes our life. So you actually are going to have tons of those insights when you're building a company and invest on them, diversify your assets. That's awesome.

52:14That is awesome. When investors are putting money into something, they like try to study the company and say, oh, is this a good company? We're front and center on people pitching us decks and people on those video calls saying, we promised to do this and this and this. And one out of 20, you're like, this is a new company. it really does solve what we want to do. We started using this. It is making me more money. Well, that's what you want to invest in. But we're looking for the solution for our company, not for the investment. So what a great way to look at that. I'm going to start doing that.

52:49Literal example that happened in the last two years. In our chat groups, everybody starts being like, Apple Oven, man. And if you had just like the moment in our chat groups, everybody was like, this thing is cooking. And if you had gone in on Apple Oven stock, you would have crushed it. And so like, you know, I've missed out on so many of these that I'm no longer going to be an idiot. That is my resolution for this year. No more idiocy. Take the easy money, invest in things that are obviously creating value for operators.

53:22Matt Bertulli:Yeah, Mike, I have a pool of cash that I keep aside and it's like my degen pool. And I basically just follow Roman into things. So like years ago when Roman was like, I think I'm going to buy Meta. I'm like, me too, man. He was depressed. I'm like, great. App loving, same thing. I think, Sean, the Prenetics, like when we did the IM8 episode, I was like, man, I'm buying stock at this guy because Roman likes him. I did this with Shopify guys. My first company was like, we made all of our money because we were a Shopify partner. When they went public, I bought. I'm like, this company's incredible.

53:56Matt Bertulli:Toby's insane. He's the smartest guy I've ever met. I'm buying Shopify. That was great, right? Like, just, yes. Yes, all the yeses to this one. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. After Sell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target, now driving results for brands like True Classic, Hexclad, Ridge, and Jones Road.

54:34I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying three pans from Hexclad instead of two. Aftersell has already generated over$1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic or higher cap. So check out Aftersell and tell them that the operators sent you.

54:51Sean Frank:I'm glad you guys brought up Meta because I've spent well over$100 million on Meta in my life. And right now I'm spending money on meta at like a 2x return. So for every dollar I give them, they give me$2 in sales. And it's just like, do you think the stock will outperform a 2x return? And over its life, it's performed a 1600%. So if I could go back in time and just, instead of running a business, put every dollar in a meta stock, I'd probably be richer than I am right now. None of this is investment advice. We are legally obligated to say that. One real one that we haven't talked about is this goes back to building, it's never really income, but like net worth running an e-commerce business.

55:29Sean Frank:everybody I know who does their own fulfillment, owns their own warehouse, and then it's a lease back to the brand. And that lets the ownership group, if it's you or a small group of people, build net worth in an asset for free, basically, right? You're gonna pay rent to somebody anyway. You're gonna pay market rent to somebody anyway. If you can work with a bank, get a loan, buy the asset, now you have a building that in five, 10, 15 years will be paid off. And if you can do that for stores, maybe what Curtis is doing, or a factory like Curtis is doing, right? It's a great way to, maybe you'll be Spartan and make no money for 15 or 20 years, but at the end of it, you'll have like$100 million worth of real estate.

56:07Or your corporate headquarters, Sean. That like the best, maybe the best investment nominal return in my entire life is the building that I bought for that our company is in. And I bought it in 21, but it's like, it checks all those boxes. Like when you are both occupying the building and you're the owner, there's a lot of benefits to that. It's like one of the easiest ways to make money because you know the tenant's not going to leave because you're the tenant. And so like the other thing is it's diversified, it's real estate. So big, we just did this. We just did this with a warehouse kind of facility that we're building.

56:44I think I mentioned it on a previous episode. So huge fan of this as an idea. You know, all these people who made it this far in the pod, they better be subscribing and liking right now because that's gold. We did not think about that. I did not talk about that. I did that accidentally. We looked around finding a new building to rent in Portland when we were small. Couldn't do it. I had lunch with a couple of ladies who were retiring. I literally asked them to lunch. I said, how are you retiring? They're like, we bought our building 20 years ago. We're selling our buildings. And we're retiring.

57:20And I said, why did you buy your buildings? They said, 20 years ago, we went to lunch with somebody who said, I made my money by buying my building. And I said, I can't afford my building right now. They said, you can never afford the building. Buy the damn building. Now I have a$5 million building paid off in Portland that I never think about. And we still run our corporate offices there. We have a retail store in it that does$3.5 million in sales a year. And I forget that I own the building.

57:49Matt Bertulli:I think what I've learned in this show, guys, is my next job is just managing Curtis's assets so that he actually makes something out of them.

58:00Sean Frank:If you're serious about it, you got to get him that rug, dude. That's the way to get into Curtis's heart. All right, guys, the last final way to make money, you know it, you love it, you listen to the ad reads, you can launch a podcast. And as much as I love e-commerce, I'm not doing this podcast for free. So we want to thank all of our fantastic sponsors for bringing it to you. No, but I mean, seriously, you know, we started this for a fun joke, basically. We wanted to talk to each other every single week. We've all met in like the throes of COVID. We didn't have any friends. And now it's getting close to an eight figure a year business.

58:36Sean Frank:And I work probably 45 minutes a week on it. So it's a great, it's a fantastic podcast. Yeah. Turn into a real company. Yeah. We have CEOs and everything. We're selling information, which kind of went back to the previous point of like doing advising. Like once you have information, you should, you can sell it. And the gross margin on that is I think a hundred percent. And that's a great way to compliment your earning. Yeah. It's really valuable oxygen. All right. So that is the five plus a bunch of random ways to make money. You can do it and you should buy your own building. You should pay yourself a salary.

59:08Sean Frank:You should cash flow your business, take out dividends. Maybe if you get a little frisky, you get some dividend recaps in there. We got investing in random e-commerce stocks. We got selling your time, consulting. You can do stuff and start making money off of intros and referrals and kickbacks, commissions. There's a million different ways to skin Academy e-commerce. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you fellow operators. Talk to you later.