Founder Lessons From Scaling, Going Public, and Rebuilding | Rick Jordan

0:00Let me tell you the biggest lesson that I learned is that if you have that thought cross your mind, oh, I could just go out and get this cash that puts the liability on me to put it in the company to keep it going. That's not the thing that needs to change in that moment. The cash flow into the company is not the thing that needs to change. It's the company itself, something within the company and how you got to that place to begin with is where the change needs to happen first. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real.

0:34No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. On today's episode, we talked to Rick Jordan. He's back on Right About Now, and this time we're getting into what happens after the big climb. time rick took his company public they scaled fast they fell harder acquisitions can be tough you got to rebuild you got to live through the pressure today we're talking failure ego resilience and what it really takes to get back up when you run out of that rocket fuel and you got to get up and give it your own rick welcome to right about now what's shaking dude it's good to be here again man you had already done a lot and taken off but you're about to go towards this climb and you've Pat it.

1:21Whatever stage of that there is, I want you to share that. We all see and hear people talk, think that they won't be subject to things that others have, the failures, the wins, the highs and the lows. I even put people sometimes in that. It's always highs for them, never lows. It's always sunny and not raining. Yeah. And then it's like, well, why can't I be like them? Right? Exactly. We all have that a little bit. I try to live in my own lane. I do that pretty well. But at the same time, we all go through it. I'm excited for you to share a little bit of that. And I know we'll get into some rosier things.

1:54Just share what that journey's been like the last few years. I started an IT business 16 years ago now, and I got it to the point where it was doing a few million per year. And then I had gotten it to a few meaning like 4 million per year. 4 million a year is a lot to a lot of people. Truly. I thought it was a lot to me 15 years ago. Then in a matter of two year time period, I took it from 4 million to 15 in just two years. It was right about that time that we went public. And that was through some M &A, through some acquisitions because I had built this thing. You know, the movie, The Founder with Michael Keaton, one of my favorites ever, right?

2:25And Michael Keaton is playing the role of Ray Kroc from McDonald's and how he does the deal with the McDonald's brothers, a scene in there where he was on a tennis court. He was taping out masking tape on the tennis court, where the different stations were going to go for the kitchen at the McDonald's. The McDonald's brothers had this speedy system and he was like, I think we can do it better. And he had people like bumping into each other and then he would rearrange where things were supposed to go. It was really cool to watch that, especially because I worked at McDonald's. I was a shift manager when I was 16.

2:54Some of the best sales training to this day. Do you want fries with that? The best upsell line in the world. Seriously, that's celebrity upsell, dude. The McDonald's brothers and Ray Kroc made this thing scalable to where they could deploy tens of thousands of restaurants across the world because it was the same thing everywhere. And that's another thing I learned. And that's what I did is I made this IT company scalable to where I could take a rubber stamp and put it into other IT companies and clone it that way. Well, why would I want to start it from scratch in all these different places when I can accelerate super fast with some capital backing?

3:27I could just use that stamp and clone this thing. And that's what I started to do. It was going really, really well. These acquisitions, they tanked, man. There was some bad actors involved. Customers were being taken back. There was issues with invoicing clients that I had purchased and all of these other things. You're talking like lawsuits that were filed that I had filed. having it within a matter of about six months. This climb that I had started that took probably about three years to get to the point to where I could make that climb. And then we accelerated it to 15 million and it all crashed down in about six months.

3:57It's not just because we had gone public too. It wasn't just the revenue of the company. It was also the stock price, of course, because that kind of follows the hate that comes after that. And I burrowed inside of me for a little while. What could I have done differently? Where did I mess up? That's something I've always done. I've never been the blame guy to push it on other people. I've never played the role of the victim. And that's not just in business. It's in relationships. It's in every aspect of my life. It's always I turn inward and it's like, where did I go wrong first? I kept getting the same answer, even from mentors, investors that were in the company, or even guys on my board, Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank or David Meltzer from Jerry Maguire.

4:30All these guys are in my circles and literally on the board. And they're like, we don't see anything that you did wrong. Do you know how hard it is to accept that? You want to blame something and it starts at the top usually, but sometimes it doesn't when it gets bigger than yourself. As we're recording this, there's going to be some really bad tornadoes that are sweeping through Chicago. Part of my titles would be like storm chaser. I do actually literally chase them if you want to call it a hobby of mine. But that was going to be my first career when I was seven, by the way. Seven years old, I wanted to be a storm chaser.

4:57I still do it. If you're like me, you probably spend a lot of time paying attention to what's happening in the world. Markets, business, crypto, interest rates, sports, politics, all of it. I'm always looking at headlines thinking, okay, what happens next? That's honestly why I've been spending time on Gemini predictions. What makes it interesting is instead of just watching stories move the market in real time, you can actually trade on the outcomes of real world events. Maybe it's oil prices, what happens with the Fed, crypto movements, major sports events, or broader world headlines. There are live contracts across all kinds of categories.

5:41And what I like is it feels built for people who already think this way. If you naturally pay attention to trends, follow business news, or spend your day analyzing what's happening in the economy and markets, this gives you a completely different way to engage with it. The platform itself is also really straightforward. Everything runs directly through the Gemini app. The interface is clean, and there are new markets opening every day. I've been on there browsing different contracts, and it's honestly just fun seeing how quickly things shift based on real-world news and momentum. And again, it's not about just passively watching headlines anymore.

6:18You can actually participate in what you think happens next. To start trading right now, head to gemini.com slash predictions and browse through all available contracts. If you're like me, you probably spend a lot of time paying attention to what's happening in the world. markets, business, crypto, interest rates, sports, politics, all of it. I'm always looking at headlines thinking, okay, what happens next? That's honestly why I've been spending time on Gemini predictions. What makes it interesting is instead of just watching stories move the market in real time, you can actually trade on the outcomes of real world events.

6:58Maybe it's oil prices, what happens with the Fed, crypto movements, major sports events, or broader world headlines. There are live contracts across all kinds of categories. And what I like is it feels built for people who already think this way. If you naturally pay attention to trends, follow business news, or spend your day analyzing what's happening in the economy and markets, this gives you a completely different way to engage with it. The platform itself is also really straightforward. Everything runs directly through the Gemini app. The interface is clean and there are new markets opening every day.

7:34I've been on there browsing different contracts and it's honestly just fun seeing how quickly things shift based on real world news and momentum. And again, it's not about just passively watching headlines anymore. You can actually participate in what you think happens next. To start trading right now, head to gemini.com slash predictions and browse through all available contracts.

8:03You didn't know you do it figuratively and literally now. I know. That's the reflection. You start to think, am I just chasing chaos? I started to use the analogy that actually made sense to me in this journey when people that I trust and that I look up to and then I've tried to model after, like these guys that I named, when they said it's like, we don't see anything you did wrong, well, maybe it's kind of like a tornado. If you have your house, you can't just pick up and move your house to try to get it out of the way of this thing. It's hitting it no matter what. It's the best thing that made sense to me, seriously, because like even though you might see that the clouds are kind of dark and everything, but it could only be a half a mile down the road is actually where this destructive force is and you still just can't see it yet.

8:42And you're praying it doesn't hit you. Yeah, exactly. You see signs. I saw signs ahead of time before this stuff really came crashing down. And that's the thing. You start to like pick up pieces like, is this really happening? You start investigations and then that takes a little bit of time, a month or two months or whatever. Remember, all this took place in a matter of six months when it came crashing down. It happens really, really quick. You spend 15 years building something and then it can crash in six months. When it does, this is the part that I was getting at. And of course, shareholders, they don't understand.

9:09They need to play victim. Seriously. I'm sure a lot are going to be seeing this and I don't care. I know that I've done everything. This is exactly what happened, but it doesn't matter because people lost their investment. They lost the money that was put into it. Hey, if you looked at the filings, I have put over 2 million of my own, my hard money into this organization going public. And afterwards, I'm still the biggest investor. I'm the lead investor in myself. And I haven't gotten that stuff back yet. It's like, so what do you think I'm going to do, man? Do you think after this tornado hit that I'm just going to sit in the rubble and throw my hands up and be like, well, I guess this is my home now.

9:40I landed in shit. You're going to get out as fast as you can. It does. It takes time to rebuild that stuff. That's the mode that I'm in right now. It's been great. I look back and if I visualize the rubble of a house completely destroyed by a tornado, that really sucked. I hope that's never going to happen again. But you know what? Maybe this time I'm not going to use a wood frame. Maybe I'll use steel beams or something like that. Fortify this sucker like it was in the middle of Florida facing a Category 5 hurricane. The thing is just utterly destroyed like that. You built up a couple million, four million, and then you took it to 15.

10:09And I get you start scaling. You do M &A and you scale. It's curious to me that how it becomes zero. You built it alone before you went public and all that. Why is it zero? Is there nothing to carve out of this thing? It didn't go to zero. It went to two. Built it up to four. Then M &A and going public got it up to 15 in a matter of two years, right? From the four to the 15 and then six months and went down to two, which is where we're at right now. Most of the customers that were part of these acquisitions were just gone as well because of the results, the aftermath of a lot of these things. That was all disclosed.

10:42I was grateful though, truly, because I kind of kept a little bit of a foundation to kind of start again. If you want to look at it, if we're using this house analogy, it's kind of like I always had a suitcase, kind of like a go bag in that area. I did the M &A through a different company that went public. This is good for people to talk about. If you want to talk about asset protection or isolation and made sure because we were independently audited to man being a public company, making sure that if there was anything, because I kept some staff in my private company, some technicians and all that.

11:10So then they were servicing customers of the public company, but that actually became like a vendor client relationship. And those transactions were fully audited so that they stayed in an arm's length because interrelated company transactions are never that great. When it comes to being a public company, that's why we made sure we did everything right in that and kept everything completely separate. All the transactions completely logged. If there was services, in essence, being provided, there was invoices that were going back and forth, man. So in essence, it's like my private company, which I retained customers in.

11:39And I never transferred all of them over when we went public, which is why we went down to the two. It was kind of like the go back. Exactly. Yeah. You kept the security blanket, but you had no intent on using it. That's a good point because it was never a desire to keep those customers separate. It was actually going to be another acquisition for us, acquiring the original customers. But then the timing in what it was, it made sense to just keep that. Let's just stop for a moment. Let's put the brakes on because we just discovered some not so great things with the people that were selling these businesses to us.

12:11Let's see where this pans out first. And then it became a blessing, dude. Seriously, as the foundation again. And that's the part that's like, I don't know if anybody ever really goes back to zero. Do you? No, I wouldn't think so. I've had a crash and burn myself and I didn't go to zero. I mean, I lost a million dollars in the car business in 2014, but I didn't go to zero. You know, I was doing Carvana before Carvana. I had the idea right, the execution wrong. I didn't go public. I didn't go that far. I took all the crashing and all the burning. But not zero, right? No, not zero. But it was enough to land on my feet.

12:45And there's always another day. I feel that in you. I would have known that about you anyway. I know you well enough that I call you a friend. But obviously, from a distance, we don't see each other often or anything like that. But I know you to be a fighter. And I know you to be someone that would never go to zero. not just in the bank account, but more in the aptitude and ability and the soul. I know what's there. You'll be all right. A lot of people probably relate to this conversation. You know, like we've all had failures of different scale and different sizes, and you're never immune to it.

13:16Got the t-shirt. Learn from failure. I like to keep it raw and real. And it sucks, especially when you feel like you let people down. That does creep in too, man. I know I didn't say that in the story I was telling, but that does creep in. You and I are kindred spirits that way. How did I allow this to happen? Because it's affected so many. Yeah, you take it personal. Even if you couldn't change anything, it weighs on you. It's human, but it's also human for those people that feel like, okay, well, I don't know what they would have expected you to do different. There's another thing that's a little hard for guys like us to grasp when it comes to people that are working for you.

13:48For the majority, 99 % of them, the mental point of origin is not the organization. It's themselves. When you're the person at the top, it's like the mental point of origin is almost never yourself. When the company needed cash, I kicked it in. When the company needed to pay expenses, I would pay those expenses on a credit card. I would go without taking my salary out of the public company. Long before it got to anybody else, that's a big lesson that I learned on this too, man. And entrepreneurs expect it to be self-sacrificing and fall on their own sword. And that's what I found is the expectation of everybody who works for you in the organization too.

14:23From founding it 15 years ago and bringing on the first employee, the very first one in 2011, who actually stayed with me through this entire thing, but then left in the middle of the stuff. It was another hard lesson for me. And seeing that take place, it was just, I get it. I understand why everybody is in the place that they are. And at the same time, maybe I should take some cues from them in this next run. If I'm not in a good place, the organization won't be in a good place. I'm picking up what you're throwing down a little bit. You probably wrote checks that you probably shouldn't have written.

14:52Totally. Yeah. Because you were trying to save it or do what you can. You felt like it was altruistic. It's the right thing to do. But it actually probably wasn't for you. Yeah. Not that you're being selfish. You're trying to do what you felt was the right thing. But at the same time, it's not. It's an interesting place to be when you've built something like you did. And it's always on you. I've never gone public and don't plan to. Like anything that I've done, I've intentionally kept it in my own circle, my own failure, my own wins. I mean, I've got teams and all that. It would be a struggle for me.

15:19I could write that check, but I'm not going to because I can't. Like that's just not for certain things. And unless you've done and been in those levels, you don't quite understand what the hell are you talking about? No, you just write the check. No, no, actually you don't write the check. That feels right, but it's not right because the company has to stand on its own. I was coaching a friend of mine the other day for the same exact thing. And it was like, yeah, he's like, I pulled money. This is a friend of mine. Open a loan. That way I could put that cash into the company. He's like, you know, I just kept trying to get it going and now it's just in a bad place.

15:47I'm like, let me tell you the biggest lesson that I learned is that if you have that thought cross your mind, like, oh, I could just go out and get this cash that puts the liability on me to put it in the company to keep it going. That's not the thing that needs to change in that moment. The cash flow into the company is not the thing that needs to change. It's the company itself. Something within the company and how you got to that place to begin with is where the change needs to happen first. Yeah, you're treating symptoms and not the disease. We got a disease and you're buying the best cough medicine on earth.

16:15And that cough goes away for about two weeks until that next payroll comes. That's about it, dude. Seriously. You expect the things to turn around in that short period of time. You're not buying a cure. Not unless you spent that money on the fixer. But he don't exist either. He's only in movies. I thought he was Rick Jordan. He is the CEO. Are we still Reach Out Digital? Yep. Reach Out Digital. The public company, we got that name change in the midst of all this stuff, kind of after everything came crashing too. So it's kind of good. The public company that I took over for this was Younglings Ice Cream Corporation.

16:43I was writing signatures and documents and everything as the CEO of an ice cream company throughout this period. But then now it's frequency holdings. The symbols FRQN is my show, which I need to have you on. It was all in with Rick Jordan of years, you know, and then this year going into January rebranded. It's amazing. I'm grateful that it's in the top one, one and a half percent in the world and it's top 100 on Apple. You know, it's been incredible ever since the rebrand. But the rebrand of my show to frequency came before the public company name change. We had started to plan this and I'm like, well, that should just be the name of the pub co too.

17:16It's this whole thing. If I'm acquiring businesses and I want things that are symbiotic and have both high frequencies and low frequencies in their vibe and what they produce, kind of the energy levels that they have. Because it's like conversations, even like you and I, it's like we can have moments in this episode or in the previous episode that'll be very different. We could just go off and off and off. These high frequencies, messages and high frequencies, they can download a lot of data, a lot of information in a heartbeat. It's almost like a shock value in that moment. It can wake somebody up or it can knock somebody out.

17:47It doesn't last. That effect doesn't last that long. It's men. Like if anybody's ever seen who's watching this has seen Tony Robbins or whatever, it's like there's moments he does this too intentionally where he'll pound so hard and then all of a sudden he'll bring it down to a low frequency because those are deep, just like wavelengths and literally in radio frequencies, it's these long waves that are meant to penetrate super deep. They can go through buildings. They can go through the hardest substances and they can travel really far. And those are the sustaining things. That's another thing that I learned throughout this, too.

18:15But it's like, well, that's the vision for all of these acquisitions that I was doing to all these symbiotic things. It's like it really kind of fits. I used to think it all had to be the same frequency. I've changed that tune. It can all be different. You need different frequencies, but you all got to be on the same channel. How you get there. We all need to be in that channel, but the frequencies and all that are all needed because you need highs, need lows, need middles. And that goes a lot of way from diversity to talent, to skill sets, to ability. All of those can be frequency and intensity of certain things like those frequencies, but the shit don't play if it ain't on the right channel.

18:47If I'm going to stick with this vision of like the house in the rubble, I can look back and I'm like, you know what? I guess there was some things about that house that I really didn't like anyways. I always like wanted to paint that front door and change the shingles. You got a blower to clean it. You need mortar to fix it. I'm glad we could laugh about it, dude, because I mean, that's true.

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