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Get a DemoWhat are the five ways ecommerce owners actually get paid? Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge), Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi), Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern), and Curtis Mastko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods) break down five real ways ecommerce operators get paid. Each path trades speed for risk, and none of them is easy money. Valuation sets the ceiling, and buyers lean on EBITDA multiples to get there. Distributions are where most operators get paid, if they resist reinvesting too much. Debt speeds that timeline up, though it comes loaded with risk. The episode ends on salary, pitting one founder’s restraint against another’s ambition. Powered By Fulfil https://9ops.co/fulfil Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Northbeam https://www.northbeam.io/ Saras Analytics https://bit.ly/9OP-Ytdesc Postscript https://9ops.co/postscript Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Get Rich in Ecommerce 00:01:33 Tactic 1: Sell The Business 00:06:14 Turning Down 83 Million 00:12:30 Tactic 2: Take Distributions 00:19:45 Operators vs Shareholder 00:22:45 Tactic 3: Dividend Recap 00:24:16 Debt Is Ecommerce HGH 00:32:07 Tactic 4: Pay Yourself First 00:39:26 Curtis Bids On A Rug 00:41:09 Tactic 5: Run a Side Agency 00:44:26 Credit Card Point Payout 00:47:10 Mentors & Board Seats 00:49:39 Invest In Your Own Tools 00:55:21 Buy Your Own Building
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Welcome to the Operators Podcast. What's up everybody? We're here with the best, the only operators that you know and love. We have Matt, Mike, Curtis. Curtis, how are you, brother?
Curtis Mastko: The world treats me well, sir.
Better than you deserve, I'm sure. What's up, Mike? How are you doing?
I'm great. Here in Oklahoma, it's 125 degrees. I'm happy to be inside and on the Operators Podcast.
Yeah, that's, that's why, that's why you got into e-commerce. You didn't have to go out there and dig ditches, but okay. Matt, how are you, brother?
Not 125 degrees. It is like 100 here though. So I'm with Mike. It's hot as hell. Happy to be inside.
I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure Central Mexico is also cooking, right, Curtis?
Curtis Mastko: No, no, no. We're on the high plains. It's like, be about 83, 85 today.
All right, dude.
Curtis Mastko: We're all moving to Mexico. That's why people live here, man.
We're all moving to Mexico. Guys, today's episode, it's a banger. It is a viral episode that everyone always asks for. It's how to actually get rich in e-commerce. So we're gonna go through 5 amazing ways to make money in this stupid industry that we all choose to live in. Some of 'em are obvious. We're gonna talk about getting paychecks, but some of 'em are a little more crazy and outlandish, maybe credit card point hacks, something like that. So we're gonna go through the top 5, and it's pretty ironic that you're listening to a podcast 'cause that's one of the bonus ways we're gonna talk about at the end is there's a reason why everybody in e-commerce has a podcast 'cause it's a lot better than taking money outta your business. But you guys ready to get started?
Let's do it.
Okay, so I'm going to have the first way, and this way is exiting the game. It is you sell your asset. It is the hardest way in the list, right? It's the biggest payday you're going to see. Groove just sold for $1 billion. That means they got $1 billion in cash or stock in a publicly traded company for the asset that they created, the ownership, the stock, and the thing that they built. Now, It's a huge payday. It is what they were pushing for. They raised money to get it done. But the difference is they don't own it anymore. Like they're not in e-commerce anymore. Chad still has a job, right? He might've rolled over some equity, but you sell the asset, you leave the industry, and you get cash in return. So out of everybody here, Matt is the only person I think who's done it. Matt, so tell us about selling your business.
You get a lot of money all at once, and then at some point in the near future, you wake up and realize that all the cash flow's gone. So there is this weird thing where you're like, man, my, I got a lot of zeros in my bank account, but I feel really weird because I have no more cash flow.
You're on a burn. It's kind of like a, you're a Series A company that like you, you're used to like, hey, I'm kind of living sustainably because there's cash flow coming in and it's awesome to have a huge sum. But then the, it changes from like trying to have a lot in the bank to trying not to have too high a burn rate.
Yeah, it's actually really calm. You hear this from a lot of guys that have exited, even, uh, guys that like people that exit for a lot of money, right? Like hundreds of millions, they'll still turn around and be like, I don't know, I don't, I don't feel as safe. Like I just don't have money coming in every month. And it's like, you've $100 million in your bank.
You know what that sounds like, Matt? That sounds like a good problem to have.
It's a great problem to have.
Yes.
Uh, I will say though, I think Sean, you gotta hit on like in consumer, this is a really hard thing to do. Right. Uh, that there's not a lot of exit right now. There's just not a lot of exits and the market is not great for most categories.
We went through a heater of a, I mean, uh, the 2010s was a great decade for consumer and then obviously it peaks post-COVID 2021. Like everyone and their mother was selling everything for hundreds of millions of dollars. Horrible businesses were trading for 15x EBITDA or whatever. Right. Um, that was like, you know, That was our debt-fueled bubble. You had Therazio just pumping money into everybody. That's all gone now. And even great companies have a really hard time selling. I think Ridge is a fantastic company. They're just strategic in this space. I'm friends with them. It wasn't an official offer, but they're like, yeah, we'll buy you for like 6, 7 EBITDA. And it's like, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna keep running my business, right? Because there's other ways to make money. We have 4 more ways we're gonna talk about, but did it— has anyone else here sold?
No, we have to do valuation. Well, so we have an ESOP, so it's kind of like selling a little bit of the company every year, and you have to do a valuation annually. And so I'm pretty, I would say, intimately familiar with the valuation process. And what people need to realize is, first and foremost, the public company comps, everything flows downstream from there. So you may have ideas of what you think your business is worth, but what any investor, any acquirer is going to do is they're going to start and say like, well, what are similar companies that are publicly traded? And okay, now it's time to add the discounts. And there's discounts for all kinds of things. Like if you're, you know, depending on the size of your company, you're going to get a discount to public companies. Public companies are doing hundreds of millions or billions in revenue. You're probably not. And so you're going to get a discount to that. You're going to get, you might get a discount based on your ownership structure. You might get a discount based on your tech stack and your tech debt, you might get a discount based on, you know, whatever, that we're at war with Iran. They're going to throw all these discounts on it. And this is where people get caught pretty off guard by the valuations that you come back with. I mean, Sean, you mentioned 6 or 7. I mean, when we do ours, we typically get a number between 7 and 9 depending on where the market's at. And that's, I think in consumer hard goods, I think that that's going to be pretty typical. And people are like, well, I don't want to sell my business for 7 to 9 times EBITDA. And it's like, well, Then you're probably not going to sell your business because there's all these publicly traded companies that are running at 12, 13, 14 equivalent, sometimes as low as 10, and that's what you're going to be comped to. So if you're interested in selling your business, the first thing to do is go get evaluation, get educated on the way that buyers are going to think about your business and level set what's your kind of realistic best day and do you want to sell at that?
[Sponsor Content] Now I have some strong opinions here, Sean, because I've had some offers. I've had offers 4 years ago, 5 years ago, and I've had offers this year. I've had serious, I've had detailed ones. I can't go into a lot on this, but I can tell you there's just a real shortage of really great companies out there. And so it's not that the market has dried up, it's the market's dried up of sending to companies that they don't really believe in.
Yeah.
[Sponsor Content] Because we got serious people that are always coming at us. And I think there's different levels. We were offered, 4 years ago, we were only doing $30 million a year, and we were offered $83 million for our company. And I screamed at him, I yelled at him, I said, how dare you offer me that money, you sons of bitches? Like, do you not know who I am? I mean, I didn't know what I was doing. I was an idiot at the time. But there is a, that $30 to $50 million, if companies have that, they're, and they have a good company, there's a lot of people that are looking. We all love to talk about, here's the billion-dollar exit, here's the $500 million, here's the big ones. There's a lot of market for $30, $40, and $50. Under $30, it's not worth the due diligence and the lawyers and the paperwork and the millions that have to be spent. But at 30, they know they can get in and lead you up to $200 million and resell you. And that is a really good market out there. So I have talked to a lot of people, so there's a lot more market out there for 30 to 40 to 50. The problem is most people are one-trick ponies. They're like, hey, I got this Amazon business. I put it on Amazon. We skyrocketed. We're at $30 million in sales. Yeah, you're an Amazon company, dude. Like if anything changes, you're screwed. You haven't created a brand. You don't have a future. You don't have all the things that they're gonna need to take you to that next step.
Uh, I think Curtis, that's a good point. Uh, like what Curtis is saying, Sean, is sort of like Groon's, your example was Groon's, right? Chad basically genetically engineered Groon's for sale, right? Like he saw what all the companies, 'cause he was at Summit before, he saw, he like, here are the variables that need to ha— like a business needs to have to be worth a billion dollars. And then he worked backwards. He's literally said this on the show, like he just worked backwards from here's the list of things that need to be true. And I think, Curtis, what I'm hearing you say, which was true when I sold my company too, like when we decided to ultimately sell in our space, there was an EBITDA number and a revenue number and a growth rate that if we hit those and we had some consistency over time, we knew exactly what the multiple would be. It was like, this is just what the private equity buyers in this category are paying. And I think that that's probably true in consumer. You know, it likely, there's like some category variance, right? Like if you go from beverage to maybe hard goods, there's like a big spectrum of there. But you probably need to be older than a couple years. Like you likely need to be more than 5+ years old. So you have consistency.
Right? Why?
Because buyers are risk-averse. So like when they look at a company, they want to know that what they're going to do, Mike, is they are going to look at past performance as some indication that you'll be around for a long time. And when somebody is paying 6 times EBITDA, that is literally 6 years of your current EBITDA run rate. So like in their mind, am I going to get at least another 6 years of a business out of this place? And if you've only been around for 2, there is no proof that you will be around for 6 years or 8 years.
[Sponsor Content] Whereas if you've been around for 10, and the only way to do it in 2 is you find one rocket ship deal. Here's, here's e-commerce, here's Meta, here's Amazon, here's TikTok, here's something. You found something, you put everything in. You haven't expanded out into different channels in 2 or 3 years. You've literally done one channel. It worked. You built it up.
I say age, Mike, because age is typically a good proxy for like, you've done other things. So like Sean at, how old is Ridge now?
Uh, getting close to 15 years.
Right. And like how many product categories and how many channels and like years of consistent, like you can sort of plot the growth on a thing. So a, a buyer is gonna look at Ridge and say like, this is a higher quality business because it checks off more of the boxes I need. And the less boxes that that buyer can check off, the more they're going to discount the companies. Like, they're just going to have a much higher discount rate on the multiple because they're just trying to protect their ass. Like, the— I find a lot of operators— my experience with like M&A, and I've, I've sold a company, I've raised tens of millions of dollars, and I've helped other people sell companies— the thing that operators need to remember is like, you're really good at running a company, they aren't, but they're very good at valuing them and very good at buying them. That is like, they've got thousands of reps into putting a number on your business. You might not like it, but they're better at it than you are.
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So the most probable is that you take distributions, right? Like in my first company, by the time we sold it, I've said this before, we had already taken out almost as much money. I think actually maybe even a bit more, but almost as much money as we got when we sold it in distributions. And that was over 10 years. And I think, Sean, you do this, Mike, you do this, Curtis, you do this, like taking money out of your business in the form of a distribution. So like dividends is what we call them here, is like, is the most probable.
Curtis Mastko: I have quite, I've questions on this.
Like, I think it would be good to give people who are listening guidance on like, uh, how much of your company do you actually think you can distribute every year? Because there's the inventory and working capital component. So like, I'm sure there's math that you guys do for this, but I think distribution being the most probable, probable if you have like the profit rate and like sort of the, the cash cycles and all the other things. This is the way that In our network, most people make the most money.
Well, the vast majority, I think if we had the statistics, we would see that less than 1% of e-commerce businesses ever are sold. And we don't have those in front of us, but I feel pretty confident it'd be that number. And yeah, like you said, let's talk really practically, Matt, about what goes on here. So you've got an EBITDA number, and if you take your EBITDA number, let's say a business does a million in EBITDA, you're going to have to pay taxes on that. If you're in the United States, you're going to have to pay both federal and state. So let's just plug something in there like 45%. So your absolute best day, you need zero for working capital, you distribute everything out of the business, you have really no interest expense because you have no debt, would be 55% of EBITDA. And that's never going to happen because either you are going to have some interest expense or you are going to be growing and you're going to need to grow your working capital. So I think a good expectation if you're listening to this is take your EBITDA number, and if you have very small nominal amounts of debt, and if you're not growing very fast, you may be able to get somewhere between 40% and 45% out of your business in distributions. And the faster you're growing, the lower that number goes. The more debt you have, the lower that number goes. So it's easy to be like, hey, my business made $1 million. Yeah, but in terms of cash that's going to actually potentially hit your bank account, Maybe $400,000 is a realistic expectation. And I think that this is how, you know, it's easy to like think you're going to make more money than you are. So how much in revenue does the average e-commerce business need to get to $1 million in EBITDA? Maybe $10 million, maybe $7 million if you've got really good EBITDA margins. So you sell $7 to $10 million worth of stuff. Maybe you can get $400,000 out. And this is the math that's kind of counterintuitive, but you have to be clear-eyed about what's really possible.
I'm happy you brought up the growth rate thing, Mike. This is a, like, we, I mean, we're probably guilty of this on this pod, but if you look at the content in consumer, everybody is obsessed with like super fast growth rates. And I'm like, but if exit is a low probability outcome, And you're trying to get— build a business that generates a lot of cash for you, then like, why are you trying to double or triple every year?
It's feedback I always give entrepreneurs who ask for it. You know, because of this platform, this podcast, a lot of people email me and I'll do a lot of calls just for free, just trying to help people out. And you'll see brands being like, yeah, I'm trying to grow 200% this year. And I'm like, but why? Like, I'm like, you know, it's, it's really, really hard to sell these assets, especially now, right? Curtis got an offer for 3x. revenue back in 2022. And I bet he wishes he took that because that'd be a great outcome for 3x revenue. And if anyone's writing those checks—
[Sponsor Content] I don't, I'm glad. I actually, the same people came back later and offered much, much more. And I sat there at a conference table and I said, should I have taken the first deal? And they went quiet and they said no. So no, no, I'm glad I did not take that deal. And I want to tell you this, Matt, I've never really taken a distribution.
What?
Yeah, really?
[Sponsor Content] I've never really taken— I don't. I went golfing with this guy and I know his company pretty well. Like he did $10 million last year. He's going to do about $30 million. He's growing really well. He just bought like a $4 million house. Curtis. Okay. That's awesome. And he was saying, yeah, I'm worried about money and cash flow and all this stuff. And I'm like, Yeah, I didn't have those worries. He's like, but you've taken out like randomly like a million dollars here and a million dollars there. And I'm like, no, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. I've taken out half a million dollars. No, I have never taken out— huh?
You had a beautiful house. What'd you pay for it?
[Sponsor Content] I have a staggering house in Mexico, a famous soccer player's house. Okay. I paid $760,000 for that house off of money that I made off of a deal when I bought my mother a house 10, 15 years ago and then resold it and made a bunch of money and I had some stock sitting around. No.
This is about to turn into an intervention, I think.
Yeah, I'm a weirdo. I'm a weirdo. I am about high growth, high growth. Keep it in the company, grow this thing and sell it someday. I'm the weirdo here, guys.
Well, Curtis, you're going to be the first billionaire on the podcast because the rest of us are taking out distributions. And before we get off this point, I want to bring up that calculator that Mike was hinting at, right? So, you know, a good rule of thumb is let's say you have $1 million in EBITDA, half it's going to go to taxes. You have $500,000 left. You're going to need some amount of working capital. So you say you take 20% of that for the working capital for next year. So that's, you know, $200,000 off the top. And then that pool of money you have left, half will go to inventory, half can be distributed. So, you know, we're talking about somewhere between 10% and 20% of EBITDA earnings actually going back into your pocket. That's the way, that's the way we kind of run it at Ridge. And then we set targets every single month of like, hey, we're going to pay out a minimum of $1 million. And it's taken us a very long time to get there. The first time I made $1 million a year was like 2020, 2021. And the business was doing $50, $75, $100 million those years, right? So like, it's to actually get to the point where you're distributing meaningful amounts of money, Because it has to be excess cash flow. The business can't consume the cash. So like, you know, Curtis is in a position right now where his business can consume all the cash he's producing and he's growing fast and he's building factories and he's, you know, apparently flying, I don't know where. This guy's not spending any money. But all his asset is consuming all of the cash it can generate. At a certain point, you know, your business reaches a place where it can spit off cash that you can actually take out. And it's probably 10 to 20% of actual net income. But I would love to hear you guys' perspective before we hit the third point.
You have 2 hats usually that you're wearing. You're wearing this operator hat and you're wearing this shareholder hat. And even though we think about those 2 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, and 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. So ironically, The worst thing that I've ever done is given too much of my cash flow 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 cash flow that's going to come out of the entity. It'll actually help your management team do a better job.
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Dude, you're, you're getting claps. Um, 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. Banks 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. Like 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 the, 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 a 20% interest rate. And 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 gotta 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 gotta grow at 70%. You gotta achieve a 70% return on your capital, and that's just a very high bar. So you can juice things. I mean, like debt is like the HGH of the e-commerce world. If you want to get bigger, 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.
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? Like, 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 8-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, you know, that's years of distributions that that go away. But if I'm factoring my receivables, then 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 think then 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 in EBITDA. There are lenders who would say like, we'll give you a 2x, like we'll give you 2 turns on your EBITDA to do a dividend recap, right? That's the thing that like, I know many of our friends do this and they do it like every 2 or 3 years, right? And one of the reasons to do this, I don't know if Sean or Curtis, you're going to hit on this, is it is actually tax efficient to do this. Like, so the, because then the debt, the tax, sorry, the interest on the debt is tax deductible for the business. The business is going to 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.
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 3rd way to make money and your relationship with debt.
[Sponsor Content] 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 very brilliantly said, hey, Gruen's 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 because over 3 years you're paying a low interest rate and now your company's gonna 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 gonna 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. So, 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 4 years is going to pay for that because my growth is more valuable than the interest rate that I'm paying. and I take that money out, I'm gonna grow, 'cause I'm gonna double the company in the next 2 to 3 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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So if you believe, if you believe in your company.
This was a riveting debt debate. I actually thought it was going to be a more one-sided, but 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, do you have like a, like a really bland way to do it?
[Sponsor Content] I've got so many bland things in my damn life. Uh, 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 fricking money and I live on it. And that's half of what I do. I'm not even in the top 5 people that get paid in my company, by the way. I'm not even in the top 5. 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. Everything 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 life 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. I 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 Disney World? I'll be bored.
This 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. But 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 5 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, but it's just bad governance. It's just foolishness really. Like, I need to take what I'm worth in the market for like 5 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? Simple 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 a strong company balance sheet to have a strong personal balance sheet. So like, the thing that it took me probably 6 years to do was like, hey, let's go out there and figure out what my market comp should be, and I'm, 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 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 your replacement? Do 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 what— is that why I'm the guest on here today?
No, no, this is— it's good to have different opinions because, you know, Mike's out here being like, look, pay yourself a market rate salary, and Curtis is apparently working for minimum wage. So it's— it just— it just depends. It just depends on who you ask.
Curtis is getting paid in piñatas. He earned 8 piñatas last month and he's very happy.
When you said $100,000 your first 2 years, I think my first 7 years I didn't pay myself. First 7 years I didn't pay myself $100,000.
You guys say that Curtis is a, an audience favorite for this reason, cuz, cuz a lot of the audience is exactly where Curtis is. They're putting every dollar into this business. They believe in 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, a 9-figure successful business and there's a million ways to do it.
So, can I actually, Sean, before you go on though, can I hit on one thing that Curtis said that I think is just gonna fly by without mentioning it.
Please.
Curtis, uh, 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 fi— 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 outta your business by just having the business. 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 like, it is a very good point that like part of it, part of what we do with our jobs is like all of these ancillary benefits and the fact that it gives us something meaningful to work on other than spending money.
[Sponsor Content] And 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 I'm a, my favorite movie of all time is The Big Lebowski. You gotta 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?
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 kind of—
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. You, 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.
God, have you not seen the movie, Mike? No, I haven't.
But Diane Keaton's, was it her hat or her scarf? You 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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There's so many 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, Uh, 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.
So Matt is saying work 2 jobs. He said e-commerce is so hard. You have to work 2 jobs sometimes. Um, look, I think, 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. That's what we're talking about here. So we went through, you know, you could sell your asset. We're all building assets, and like, somebody will maybe want to buy that one day. If you don't want to sell your asset, You can just run the thing, cash flow it, take out distributions, just do 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 2, 4, maybe 5 years of distributions upfront 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, you know, run an agency and build something that actually cash flows while you try to have this long-term equity bet. And I put that in this weird bucket where we're going to go through all of the random ways to make money. And Matt, do you want to take one of those too?
Let's start with what we see often. I've never actually done this, although I think it'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.
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 'cause it sounds like a lot of work too.
I make money off intro people to you, Sean. I, I send you people all the time.
Sean pays Mike. He doesn't go the other way though.
It's a, it's a tough world out there. However people wanna make money, right? If you don't wanna run an agency business, you could just be a referral partner. Um, But yeah, not a way I've made money. You can intro agencies, you can intro software, you can intro credit card programs. 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.
Curtis, obviously. How do you think he's gonna buy the rug?
Yeah. Curtis. Okay. Let's, let's talk about a fun one. Credit card points. How, how are you really paying for that driver? Is it all credit card points?
[Sponsor Content] 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's kind of helping me, like my 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 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. I don't care about that. Never looked up for like 4 or 5 years. And then she's like, I'm really— my account, my CFO says, hey, uh, 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 the last 2 years is $800,000 and $800,000. I think I should make more this year. I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? Never even paid attention. Now see, here's the thing, guys. You can be smart in little ways and stupid in other ways. So 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 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.
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, that is such human nature. It's like, well, I made $800,000 last year. I think I should make $1 million this year. And it's like, no.
That's what they said.
Nobody here makes a million.
It's like, I was in the— I didn't know you made $800,000 at the time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm about $100,000, $150,000 at the time.
Yeah. Dude. Hilarious. Okay.
Um, you know, well, my poor Mike. Mike is such young, he's in such good shape and he's gonna have an aneurysm listening to how I run my business.
No, you're just the most singular person I've ever met, Curtis. I love, I love you. You bring so much sunshine into my life.
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Another great one, and Matt, I'm gonna go with you, you for this is, uh, be a mentor. I think, I think you, you actively do this and you should talk about it.
I do.
I do. There's 3 ways to look at this. So, uh, like you, Sean, I'll get on like for free, like 15 to 20 minute calls with people. get a lot of requests like, hey, can you jump on and do this? I do that. Uh, I don't do any like, uh, pay for hourly type things like, you know, MentorPass and stuff like that. Um, those platforms, I don't do that because I— the time, it's just 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 weeks, work on the business together, like actually get in the weeds with people. Uh, I don't do it as much for cash as I do because it's just fun. Uh, it gets the most fun. I get— it's like you just get to play with other people's companies and it's just like the best time. Um, 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 4 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, like it's a very valuable thing you can do for other brands.
Dude, for sure. And, uh, You know, I don't think there's any shame in helping people with your, with your knowledge and expertise.
You can have such impact on people's lives. Like, man, I helped a guy sell his company recently.
I feel great.
He made $100 million. Like, I am so happy that, that, that was like, I had a small part in that. I'm like, it's awesome work.
For sure. Um, you know, and then similar in the same vein is being paid to be on board seats. Um, oh yeah. You know, like, uh, I get asked to be on boards all the time and the ask to be on a board is they, they give you equity in the business or, or, you know, $50,000 a year or whatever. 'Cause it's just, there's a time commitment, there's a travel commitment, the whole thing, right? So, um, if you know, that's, I think, underexplored and under-talked about is that like every company has to have a board and, you know, you, you typically want somebody who's independent to be on there and they want expertise. So, um, I, it wouldn't surprise me if Mike's on 10 boards by next year. So, uh, Mike, what's, 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? My e-commerce companies are going to go to the moon. you need to do it. And so like 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'd just put all the money in Amazon stock, how would I have done? I I would've done really well, you know, like, or I remember before Shopify was a thing, like if you got in on the Shopify IPO, you crushed it. Why 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 gotta 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 gotta have it, if I just put money in that stock, I would've done awesome and I would've been more diversified in the process. And so like, 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. Great 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 gonna have tons of those insights when you're, you're building a company, uh, and invest on 'em, diversify your assets.
[Sponsor Content] That's awesome. Like, that 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 are front and center on people pitching us with decks and people on those video calls saying, we promise to do this and this and this. And 1 outta 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.
Literal example that happened in the last 2 years in our chat groups, everybody starts being like Apple Oven Man.
No, I know.
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 AppLovin stock, you would've crushed it. And so like, 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.
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 gonna buy Meta. I'm like, me too, man. Like he was depressed. I'm like, great. Uh, AppLovin, same thing. Uh, I think Sean, the, uh, Prenetics, like when we did the IM8 episode, I was like, man, I'm buying stock in this guy because Roman likes them. Uh, 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. Tobi's insane. Like, he's the smartest guy I've ever met. Uh, I'm buying Shopify. That was great, right? Like that, just yes, yes. All the yeses to this one.
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I'm glad you guys brought up Meta because, because, you know, 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'll 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 1,600%. 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 have haven't talked about is this goes back to building really, it's not really income, but like net worth running an e-commerce business. Everybody I know who does their own fulfillment, owns their own warehouse, and then it's a leaseback 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 going to pay rent to somebody anyway, you're going to 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 5, 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.
Or 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 with Uh, a warehouse kind of facility that we're building. I think I mentioned it on a previous episode. So huge fan of this as an idea.
[Sponsor Content] 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 needed to— 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 ladies who were retiring. I said, 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. And 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.
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 it.
Matt, if you're serious about it, you gotta 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, we started this for a fun joke, basically. We wanted to talk to each other every single week. We all met in the throes of COVID We didn't have any friends. And now it's getting close to an 8-figure-a-year business, and I work probably 45 minutes a week on it. So it's a great, it's a fantastic podcast.
Yeah, it turned into a real company.
Yeah, 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 100%, and that's a great way to complement your earnings.
Yeah, it's really valuable oxygen.
All right, so that is the 5 plus a bunch of random ways to make money. You can do it and you should buy your own building, should pay yourself a salary. 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 a cat in e-commerce. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you, fellow operators. Talk to you later.