EP2 - $1.5M Business Starting From Nothing | The Real Origin Story (Part 1)

In this episode of GET ER DONE - Faith. Fitness. Building, we dive into how I start my business with nothing and exactly how I built it to where it is now. 

This podcast is about the journey of building businesses, pushing limits, growing in faith, becoming better, and learning lessons along the way. Whether you're building a business, chasing goals, improving your fitness, or simply trying to live with more purpose, you're in the right place. 

Get er done. 

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Watch this episode visually - https://youtu.be/ZYGm2tRbFyc

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Socials:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bristonrains/

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My Businesses - https://outlaweventgroup.com/

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#GetErDone

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to episode two of the Get Or Done Podcast. This episode, we're going to talk about how I started with no money, no connections, in a dorm room, and built a business over the course of five, six years and built it to $1.4 million in revenue, 73 events, 7 to 10 full-time employees, and being the fastest growing event company in the world. So with that being said, let's hop straight into this episode. Um, I want to start the episode off with where this all began because I think when somebody sees these people that make a lot of money or whatever your definition of success is, which it is not uh the definition of success is not making a lot of money, it is a successful thing, but that's not true success. But when you hear oh $1.4 million in revenue, it's like holy crap, this dude's a millionaire. No, no, no, no. I was just telling Garrett behind the camera, I was just telling him how that doesn't include all the expenses and all that, and I'm not taking home that much money. I pay myself a normal salary like everybody else, uh, and I reinvest all of our money back into the business. So, uh, but with that being said, yes, I did start and turn turn zero dollars into $1.4 million in six years. It's a pretty big return. And I think when a lot of people see these people in business or entrepreneurship make a lot of money, they're always like, How'd you do that? Like, and they always think there's like this, like it was just chance or luck or something like that. But for me, there was never any chance or luck, it was just simply putting the numbers together, using math, and getting my hands dirty and getting it done. And so I've always seen business as a math formula, and I talked about this in the last episode, but business is literally like two plus two equals four. Um, and I just did the math, and that's the math, the simple math, the multiplication, the additions, the subtractions is what got me here. And so to say all that to say that I I think the first thing that that got us to where we are now was the mental foundation that was built through physical challenges. And so before I even started the business, I had to have a character attribute to me to be able to build it to where it is now. The character attribute I had to attain was discipline. And discipline is doing things that you don't want to do, doing them anyways, for the betterment of yourself or others. And so to avoid all the big vocabulary and get to get into it, I started off as a slow, weak kid in school. In middle school, I was the weakest kid in my entire school. You look at me now, I still kind of look like a stick, but but uh in middle school, I had nothing going for me. I was just a normal kid, weak, slow, I had nothing special going on. I was an ABC student and nothing crazy going on. I hit high school, and in high school, I was one of the slowest kids on my cross-country team at the time. And I remember watching this guy named Gary V on social media, and I remember him saying things like um how there's these old people that regret things that they didn't do when they're old and they're dying. It's like they all wish they would have done that big thing in life, but they were too scared to do it. And at the time, I did not want to regret any choices that I made in life. And I didn't want to be that old guy at 90 years old looking back at my life, regretting anything. And so when I had that life revelation, I realized that I wanted to do something special and unique with my life and go after some big things in the world. And so I started down the rabbit hole of entrepreneurship in early high school. In addition to that, I was also tired of being the slowest, weakest kid in the school. And I was I was pretty much like I understood that if I dedicated myself to a sport every day, that I would get good at it, and if I got good at it, I would have success from it, and I'd be able to go to college and um and have some success there. And so basically I I decided that I was gonna go all in on running as my sport, my sophomore year of high school. And so I started training every day and I ran every single day. And two weeks in I got super burnt out. And if you ever work out or you start a new healthy habit, you'll realize pretty quickly that two weeks in you get burnt out and then you just don't want to do it anymore. Um, if you make a habit of like, I'm gonna wake up every day at 5 a.m. go to the gym, two weeks in you're gonna wake up and not want to go. And that's just a part of it. And so I had that happen to me. And I knew that most people would quit whenever that first hard thing would come and you didn't want to do it. I knew that you know, majority of people would quit, but I knew that if I wanted to, if I wanted to be someone special, that I had to do things that the majority of people don't do. And so I would force myself to get up, go out of bed, get out of bed and go run on the days I didn't want to. And that's when I started to build the foundation of discipline. And again, discipline is doing the things you don't want to do for the betterment of yourself or others. And so do you think, you know, do you think you would want to wake up every day at 5 a.m. and go run eight miles? Heck no. But if you were to do it because the reward was had more value than the pain that you were currently experiencing, then you would do it, and that's what I did. So I remember I was working like 60 hours a week, 80 hours a week, all day out in the sun. I was working three jobs, and I'd wake up in bed, and it would be 5 a.m. I would have only had a few hours of sleep, and I'll and I would wake up, and everything in my body wanted to just sleep. And I realized in those moments that I could be weak and go back to sleep and be like everybody else and live this average life, or if I wanted to be somebody special, I I I would needed to get up when nobody else would and go out and run. And I remember laying there thinking, nobody else would get up right now. Like, if you worked 12 hours in the heat all day, you got home at midnight, and you were waking up at 5 a.m. to go run eight miles, would you wake up? Like, imagine how tired you'd be. You'd work a 12-hour shift, you wake up five hours later to go run eight miles. And it's dark outside. Nobody cares, by the way. Nobody's, I have no coach, nobody's saying, man, keep keep grinding, keep training. No one's telling me that. It's just me. I had nobody, there was nobody telling me, hey, keep up, keep keep grinding, keep it up. Like this hard work's gonna pay off. I had nobody telling me that. I was my only fan. I I literally I'd wake up and I'd be like, dude, 99.9% of people would not wake up and go run right now. And I knew if I wanted to be the 0.01%, I would have to wake up and go work out. So that's what I did. I would I remember physically getting out of bed, and everything in my body just wanted to sleep. And I'd put my shoes on, I'd force myself against my own will to walk out the door and start running. And I remember I would be like two miles into my run, still half asleep. It would take me like three or four miles to wake up. So imagine running two miles and you're falling asleep. Like I was literally like drifting off, dozing off the first two miles because my body was so tired. I was exhausted. And I did that every day for three months. Every day for three months. There were days to where I'd work all day and I would get home. One of my jobs, one of my three jobs, I was a waiter at a restaurant, so I was on my feet all day, and we'd get off at like 11 o'clock at night. And I remember getting off at 11 o'clock at night, and I would go home, and I'd be like, I need to get my my my my eight miles in today. And so at 11 o'clock at night, I'd put my running shoes on and go run around my town at midnight. And I was exhausted, I was on my feet all day. I was working, and at 11 o'clock at night, I came home and put my shoes on and went and ran. I was so freaking tired and exhausted, but like the reward that I knew would come outweighed the pain that I was currently experiencing, and that mindset was so important for me to learn because at the time the reward I was chasing was that signing day at my school of me signing to a college and running. The reason I was running every day is because I wanted to go run in college, and every day, whenever I was experiencing pain or I was running and I didn't want to do it, but I forced myself to, I would always think about my signing day. I would always think about maybe me winning a race, and that wouldn't motivate me to do it. But also the idea of like, this is like some David Goggins type stuff right here. Like, like nobody else is doing this, dude. And I remember one night I got off of a shift at 11 o'clock at night, and I put my shoes on and I started running, and I went to go run eight miles. I remember this guy from my school, he's a popular guy, he was kind of a jock. I ran into him one night, it was the middle of the night, and he was outside on the street, and I just ran into him. I was running, and he was getting out of his car, and he was like, He's like, bro, what are you doing? I was like, I'm running, bro. I'm training, I'm trying to go to college and run. It was like midnight on like a Saturday night during the summer. This dude, and when he saw me, he just like it was a popular guy in school that like never liked me or anything, but like at that moment it was kind of cool because it was like it was almost like I earned his respect in that moment, which was kind of cool. And I wasn't trying to, but um it's like he saw the grind when nobody else did, and the interesting part about all this is like nobody saw that. Like my coaches in school, my cross-country coaches, my track coaches, they never saw me training. My my my dad, my parents, they knew I was gone running, and they knew I was doing like crazy mileage at crazy hours, but like that that was kind of it, and like nobody was I didn't really have people like rooting me on. Like no one was like, keep going, like you're gonna run in college, and it was just me in the grind. But I knew that if I just did it every day, eventually something would pay off, and it did. So I did end up getting to sign for a college and go running college. Um, but what I earned was more than a college scholarship to go run. What I earned was a was a new mentality, an understanding that if I put in if I put in enough work and enough reps into something for a long enough time, that eventually whatever I set after to do will happen. And I learned that in high school at 17, 18 years old, I learned that if you put work into something every single day, on the days you don't want it to, and you grind, and you do that over the course of a few years, I learned that the thing that you set after to do comes true. Like it happens. I applied that mindset also when I was in high school towards my academics at the end of the end of my junior, senior year. I at the time I was ABC student. In order to run in college, I in order to get a certain scholarship, I had to have straight A's. And I was not the best at school. Um I remember I had this super hard college algebra class my last semester of high school, and I had to get an A in that class to get a scholarship, an academic scholarship to go to school. So I took that same mentality of running and applied it towards my academics. And I remember I'd show up to this college algebra tutor every day for months and study algebra to get an A in this class, to then go to scholarship, and I barely, barely made it and was able to get the scholarship and then um able to go to college that way and have most of my school paid for because of that. But that mentality, the mentality of doing things when you don't want to do them, and doing them for a very long time is something that I learned very early on, and that is what's needed to have success and do bigger things in the world in any area, in your family, and in ministry and business, the mentality of grinding like a dog for years, and knowing that you might not have a reward today, but you will, and through years, that mentality is what's allowed me to build and be in a business where we are now, where we have um extraordinary growth, where our goal is to be the biggest and the best in the world. But it all started with the mentality, and so my suggestion for anybody before they even start a business, or uh if they if you want to do anything big in this world, my biggest suggestion is to first do something really hard that you don't want to do that's for a big reward, do it for a couple years, see the success, and then use that mentality to then go and pursue whatever it is. So, like if I were to start another business, if I were to start a ministry, if I were to enter some sort of like big athletic competition, if I was to set out to be very good at this thing, I would do all the boring hard stuff for a few years, take little to no reward during those few years, and just grind, and then eventually the day will come where it'll all show and everything will come together. And so that's the foundation that you must have to have big world impact on anything that you do. You have to have the foundation of the hard work doing the boring stuff, the stuff that sucks every day for years. You gotta be a dog, you gotta learn to be a dog, dude. I and and you know, a lot of people are like, oh, like I I could never do that. Like mentally, they're like, oh, I can never work out every day, or I can never whatever. I can never do this. And I always trace it back to like I was just I was that guy that never pursued anything special in this world, and I just kind of lived my life like everybody else, and and I just kind of lived in comfort my whole life, all the way up to in high school, and I was that guy, but you have to be somewhat you have to approach if you want to be extremely successful or build something extremely big, you have to be almost psychotic in your discipline. Like people, like if people were to look at on the outside, they would have to say you're crazy. And if people can look at your discipline or your habits towards whatever you do on the outside, if they can look at all the details of everything you do and say that you're crazy, then you're probably doing something right, and you're probably going the right direction. And so that's where it all started. That's where that's the mental framework that I had to had to have and build before I started the business. So let's now get to the business. So going into college, my freshman year, I had this extremely disciplined background when it came to running. And I continued that throughout my college running career for two or three years. I continued to grind at crazy hours and run 12 miles at midnight and do those crazy things. Um one day I was in a dorm room, or not my dorm room, I was in a college classroom. I was in my microeconomics college class in business in the business school. And the professor was teaching, but then my thoughts got in the way. And I started, I opened up this notebook. I still got the notebook, by the way. Um, and I started writing down ideas for a running company, like a name for a running company. And I had these ideas of like, what if I just started like my own like coaching business or something, and like that's what I did after college. Like, I coached people. And so I started running down these business ideas, these names, and I get so caught up in the thought of having a business and a running business, and it excites me so much that I completely just ignore the class the entire entire time, and I can't wait to get back to the dorm room. So I walk back into my dorm room and I put my key in the door, and the business name hits me, and I'm like, that's a sick business name. I'm gonna do that. And I bust open the door, my roommate's in there, and like, dude, I got a I got the I got a huge business idea, and I start hitting them with it, and then I open up my notebook and I start writing it all out. I still have the notebook, by the way. Um, but I write down the business idea, and I was like, we're gonna do events, coaching, merchandise, and we're gonna do have all things running in one company in Texas, and we're gonna do a bunch of running events, and then I started running numbers on other events, and I was like, this event's bringing in $100,000 a year, and I was like, this event's bringing in like $40,000 or $50,000. And I started doing the math, and I was like, if I just do like 20 events a year, and each event brings in ten thousand dollars, that's two hundred thousand dollars. That's not including expenses, but that's two hundred thousand dollars. And I just did the math and I was like, this can work based on the math. If I do enough events and they bring in enough revenue, I'll make this much. And I was estimating numbers based off of what other people were doing. So I was looking at other races out there, and I saw they had this many participants, they were charging this much per person, they were making this much money. I had no idea what the expenses were, but I saw the total number and I was like, I could do that, so I did. I created my first 5k, and um I basically started with like 200 bucks, kind of. So in order to make my first 5k, I had to have a website, and so I had 200 bucks in my bank account, and I think the website was like two or three hundred dollars to run and like to have online, so I didn't have enough money, so I went around my dorm room and I was handing out percentages of revenue in exchange for like 50 bucks. So I was like giving people like, hey, I'll I'll pay you 0.001% of our revenue each year, and um in return you give me like 50 bucks. So I went around my dorm room and I got like 150 bucks. So I used my 200 plus some money I raised from some people in my dorm. I used that money to pay for the website, and then I created the website. And over the course of six months, I spent 30 to 40 hours a week in college building the foundation of the business. I built our website, I was doing permits and applications for events, I was um building up our social media, I was doing everything, and I grinded, I skipped a lot of hanging out with friends, I skipped a lot of uh college experience for working on this business because I knew it would work. Like I looked at the numbers, other people were doing it, so I was like, it's gonna work. So I did my first event in December of 2020, and it was a 5k, and I think I made like 300 bucks off the event. I used that $300 to pay for like another tent and another table. And I planned another event for May of 2021 and I put that event on and I used that money to buy a few more tents and a few more tables and a few more like pieces of equipment that you need to put on for an event. And then I did another race after that, and I used that money to buy like my first trailer and to buy some more tables and tents and things like that. And the next year I was like, hey, let's do like three more events next year. And so the next year I added on three more events. And I was doing events at all the times that we were on college break. So uh spring break, winter break, fall break, summer break, I had events going. And during the school year, because I was in school, I couldn't go out and put on a race, so I didn't have any events going on. So I fit as much as I can during all of our breaks. And so pretty much my college experience was classwork, athletics, and business. I didn't have much of a college experience as far as having fun with friends and stuff. Um I kind of gave that up for the sake of building the business. And so from there, I kept adding more events each year. And so every year I'd add on a few more events, a few more events. It got to the point to where my and let me say this too before I get to when I graduated in college, all the money this business made, I reinvested all of it, and I took little to no money out. I did use a few thousand dollars to pay for some for for some school uh for like a semester or something, but I kept all the money in the business. I didn't pay myself, and I reinvested all my money to buy more equipment, to buy, to pay for a truck, to pay for a trailer, to pay for all the equipment needed. And so going into my senior year of college, I was graduating and I was faced with two options at that point. I was like, I can either go get a regular job like everybody else, or I could give this business thing a shot and start paying myself from the business. And that was kind of scary because I went from not paying myself to then I have to live off of this. And so I chose to live off the business. And I knew in order to live off the business, I had to have a certain amount of events per year. And I remember doing the math, and I was like, if I do 20 events a year, that would at least give me $3,000 a month to live off of. And I think I can make that work. So then I did 20 events that year. I graduated college and I set it up to where I had 20 events, one event every two weeks. And something I didn't realize is when I increased the amount of events that I had, and because we had been around for four years and built a brand and a good reputation for putting on good running events. That year I went to 20 events, all the events grew in size because people started learning who we are, and that we put on good events, and people started to recognize us, and so the events began to increase in participant size, and because of that, we were able to make more revenue. And so, my first year of full time in the business, I was able to pay myself three thousand dollars per month. I can show you my 2022, 20 or my 2023 tax return. I have no problem. We should do that, we should make that an episode where I show my tax returns, like show how much I made. That'd be cool. Like how much I made each year. That'd be a cool episode, anyways. I I made like $30,000 that year, and I that's what I lived off of. That paid for my apartment rent, that paid for my food, it paid for insurances, and I lived very frugally. So I didn't eat out at all. Um, I didn't buy any extra stuff. Like I was dirt, broke, and poor, and I lived like it, and I um used as little money as possible from the business. And I think that's where a lot of people fail when they start making money in their business, their business, they start buying and paying themselves all this money. And it's like, no, no, no. It's like it's like running. Like, if you're if you're gonna go run a marathon, 26-mile marathon, are you gonna gas yourself out three miles in and use everything you have? No. I was three years into this 26-year marathon, and I was barely using any money, which is gas, by the way. Money is like your gas to keep going. And so I I barely used any money. And I kept as much money in the business as possible so that way I could use it to grow the business. A lot of people, they'll start making a little bit of a good money in their business, and what they actually do is they pay themselves too much, so they can't grow and hire other people to grow the business. And because they pay themselves too much, they trap themselves in their own job to where they're then a slave to their job and they can't escape because they're paying themselves too much. And so that's a trap a lot of people fall into that I did not fall into. I would pay myself $3,000 a month, and then the business would make like a $3,000 a month profit. So, like, let's say the business made $6,000 a month profit. I paid myself $3,000, $3,000 stayed in the business. That paid for taxes, that paid for growth, that paid for emergency savings, all that. And the business began to grow. Our followers grew on social media, the events began to grow on social media, and a year in I was doing everything myself: social media, accounting, finances, emails, marketing, admin, um, race directing, and I was working 80 hours, 80 to 100 hours a week, making $30,000 a year. And it sucked and it was hard. I literally cried because it and I remember calling Asher, he works for us now. I remember calling Asher and I was like, bro, I don't know if I can do this anymore. I was like, we're we're poor. I was like, I'm working 80, 100 hours a week. I was like, I don't know if I should just give up and sell the races and go work a regular job. And shout out to Asher, but he was like, dude, you should keep going. And um, and I did, and that's when I realized I can't do this all by myself. I need to, I need to hire my first person. Margins were tight, we were we weren't making a lot of money, but I knew in order for this to somewhat stabilize and have a stable life, I had to hire somebody. And I I didn't necessarily I had profit, and if I hired somebody, I'd still have profit, but it's very little. So I made the decision and I I just I asked Asher to come work work for me. And Asher was um he was my best man at my wedding, he's one of my really good friends, best friends, and um we were on our cross-country team together in college, and we were roommates. So Asher was a guy that I loved that I trusted, and I said, Hey man, you want to come work for me? I was like, I can't pay you a lot of money, but I was like, you can come do races for full time for a living. And Asher, being the guy he is, he loves doing hands-on stuff, and so he decided to uh make the leap, and I had no idea what I was doing. Like, I I I have never hired anybody before, and so he was asking all these questions. I didn't know logistically how it was gonna work, and I was like, I don't know, like I don't know what I'm gonna do, what you're gonna do. It was a whole mess. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was like, just come work and I'm gonna give you some events and we'll figure it out. So Asher comes and works for me, and he um he's he starts out as a race director, he takes a bunch of my events. My wife at the time, she her and I were living off $3,000 a month together, by the way. My wife began to come in and help, and she was doing a lot of the email marketing, the admin stuff, and then so Asher had some races he was race directing, and I was doing some stuff for him, helping him there. Carly, my wife, was doing some of the marketing admin stuff, and then I, when Asher came in, I started adding more races for me to do. So Asher had 20 events, and then I started to make it to where I had 20 events, so we were both doing 20 events, and then my wife was helping do like uh email marketing, social media, all that stuff. So Asher was my first hire. That was the the first hire is always the scariest, but once you do it, you'll never regret it. Because what happened was is whenever I hired Asher, it gave me time to go do more work, to go get more work and to do more events, and that more events paid for me. Alright, guys, this is the end of part one. We're gonna release part two next week. So be ready to listen to that. And uh that's when we really go into deep end and more where we see the upswing of everything and uh really start to see some really cool stuff happen in the business and everything. So be ready for part two next week, and I'll see you guys then.