Million Dollar Business Lesson I Learned from a Guy With a Mullet
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 11th, 2023
Let’s talk side hustles. Side hustles are a great way to dip your toes into the water of an industry, letting you get a feel without a whole lot of risk.
I want to tell you about one of my business partners, Ryan, and our company Escape Climbing.
Before founding Escape, Ryan was a high school student with a passion for rock climbing and had the power of perseverance and resourcefulness. He started by building his own climbing wall in his farm’s barn and crafting polyurethane holds, and now we’ve charted our own path in the climbing industry.
It wasn’t a smooth journey though, we faced crucial decisions—throw money at problems or leverage ingenious solutions? And through this journey, we adopted a scrappy approach, finding creative ways to solve challenges while carefully balancing financial investments.
I believe that resourcefulness is often more valuable than unlimited resources, and we encourage our team to be MacGyvers, not Batmans, in problem-solving.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“When you’re lazy with your thinking and you’re not safeguarding your resources, no matter how big or small they are, then you will eventually find yourself bloated and hemorrhaging money without even realizing it.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
What’s going on, everybody? I just wanted to let you know real quick that the Hyper Focus Masterclass is officially live. We put a ton of time and energy into this project, and based on all the positive feedback so far that we’ve received from students, it’s pretty awesome. Seriously, we’re really psyched on how it all turned out. If you’re interested in learning all the habits, rituals, routines, systems, processes, frameworks, and more, that, you know, help me turn my ADHD into a superpower, to get out of massive debt and build many million dollar real estate portfolio over the past ten years. And you’re definitely going to want to head over to beyond theapex.com Hyperfocus and check it out. All right, let’s get to the show. So back in 2017, I joined forces with my really good friend Ryan, who had built a company called Escape Climbing. He had been building it, I think, since he was in college.
Anthony Vicino:
Actually, it was his senior thesis as a graphic design major, which is actually really funny. I think it was like in 2006 or 2007, he was going to school as a design major, a graphic designer, and for this senior thesis, he had to design a company, a logo, and all this accoutrement that comes along with that, well, rewind a couple years. Even before that, when he was in high school, he’s just this Wisconsin boy living out in the country, and he was into rock climbing. But in Wisconsin, where he was at, there’s not a lot of access to climbing gyms, there’s not a lot of access to outdoor climbing. And so he lived on a farm and had a lot of land. They had a barn, and he decided that he was just going to go and he’s going to build a climbing wall in there himself. And then he would just start making his own climbing holes, because he realized that climbing holes are really expensive. You pay for them per by the pound.
Anthony Vicino:
And because they’re made of plastic and they’re dense and they need to be pretty robust, they end up being kind of heavy. Shipping gets to be very expensive. And the holds himself, designing them, creating them, the whole process, they’re just very expensive. So where Ryan? He’s just so scrappy. He’s like, I can build a climbing wall. So he did in his barn, and it was like 20, 30ft tall. And then he’s like, I can make climbing holds as well. So he learned how to make polyurethane holds, and then he would put those on the wall and he started selling those, I think a little bit, to friends and family on the side.
Anthony Vicino:
It was like a side hustle. And when I met him in 2009 or 2008, he had a little website, Escapecliming.com. He was selling a couple of holds every now and then, and it was just like this fun little side project. He’s always been this very entrepreneurial dude. He’s a remarkable operator. If he wasn’t doing this business, he’d be doing some. He’s always got like ten coals in the fire or ten pokers in the fire. Anyway, fast forward to 2017 when I moved back to Minnesota.
Anthony Vicino:
He was, I think at that point maybe had two or three employees and was doing maybe $300,000 a year in top line revenue. And he was generally pretty happy with that because he was really prioritizing work life balance. He had two young kids. He didn’t want the business to be like this big massive thing. He’s not money motivated. He wants it to be a fun project and he wants to be able to serve. That’s a big thing for him is being able to serve the world. And he was realizing though, in 2017 he had two choices that he had to make.
Anthony Vicino:
He could either stay on the same path and kind of continue holding the fork down and they would continue doing okay, but they were never going to be able to invest back into R and D and really developing cool new projects or products for people. And they were just going to have to be content to kind of own their own little corner of the Internet and just make their sales. But one of the problems with that is that even if you don’t continue growing, you can assume that the marketplace is going to continue growing every single year, right? If you say the SP grows eight to 9% every year, then even if you try to hold steady, then everybody else is going to be improving eight to 9%. And if you’re not growing at least that much, you’re going to slowly fall further and further behind. And so there’s a very real issue here which is that it’s very hard to stay stagnant and not grow. And he was looking at the situation and he’s like, yeah, this isn’t sustainable long term because I’m still having to work so much into the system and I want to be able to pull out and work more on the business, not so much in the business. And so he came to me, it was right after I’d moved back to Minnesota, I was looking for a new project to help with and I had just helped my buddies with their climbing gym. And he comes to me and he’s like, hey, come help me with this project.
Anthony Vicino:
Let’s explode it, let’s blow it up, take it to the next level. And I was like, this sounds really cool. Sounds was fun. So we launched what we called Operation Cannonball and I explained what that is in a previous podcast. But effectively what it was is we realized that to be able to make the impact that we wanted within the climbing community, we needed to effectively ten X what we were at at that point. So about 300,000, we needed to get to about 3 million to be able to have the impact that we thought we could have on the industry. And it’s not a very big industry by any means. So, like, for context, worldwide, that industry probably maybe does $30 to $40 million.
Anthony Vicino:
So 3 million would give us a nice little carved out niche within that, like, make us a substantial player, but not like the biggest player by any means. And so when we got together and started laying out the roadmap for how we were going to blow up the company and try to start growing, we realized that there’s two paths. There was the path where you can solve the problem with money or the path where you can solve things with ingenuity. And yes, you have to find the balance, because in a manufacturing environment, which this is, there needed to be some investment into the machinery, into the infrastructure, to be able to facilitate the growth. And so we spent a lot of money, but there was also so many different areas of the business that we were really, really scrappy. And every time that every instance where we’re going to spend money, we would always ask ourselves, is there another way to do this for cheaper? Or that we could just do in house? And time and time again, just going through that mental exercise forced us to rethink how we were solving the problems. Instead of just throwing cash at it, we were trying to throw our ingenuity at it. And I firmly believe that in most cases, you don’t lack for resources.
Anthony Vicino:
You lack for resourcefulness. And one of the things that we really tried to breed into the culture and the people that we were looking to hire were what we called MacGyver’s, not Batman’s. And what we mean by that is, Batman is a billionaire who solves all his problems by throwing money at it. He has this really fancy suit, really fancy car, all these widgets and agents, and he can throw the money at it. And that’s what when you hire a lot of people, especially within the engineering world, they’re going to come in into a manufacturing environment, and they just want to throw money at the thing. Like, oh, automate this, get this robotic thing, get this software, all this stuff. They just want to throw money, money at it. And that will work.
Anthony Vicino:
But it starts to breed lazy thinking. And when you’re lazy with your thinking and you’re not safeguarding your resources, no matter how big or small they are, then you will eventually find yourself bloated and hemorrhaging money without even realizing it. Because another one of the core concepts that we believed is that whoever can be trusted with the small things can be entrusted with the big things. So if you can’t be entrusted to pinch every penny or to guard every penny, then I can’t trust you to guard the million dollars, right? And so on the converse or the flip side of hiring a Batman was we need to hire MacGyver’s. And for a lot of you maybe listening to this, you don’t have any clue who that is. MacGyver was a TV show from like, I think the 80s guy with a mullet who he’s like a spy or something. He’d go into all these dangerous situations and then he’d get caught and he’d always have to rescue himself by being really resourceful. And sometimes he’d diffuse a bomb with bubble gum and a paperclip and then he would hang glide out of there on a sheet like a bedsheet or something.
Anthony Vicino:
I don’t know, like crazy stuff. Anyway, that’s the type of thinking that we needed. We needed at that point to be very, very diligent and good stewards of our capital and only put it into the places where there was no way for us to MacGyver the solution. Like, that money was the only way that was going to solve it. And by doing that we were able to scale to a million in year one. So we over tripled in the first year and we went from 1 million to 2 million in the second year. So doubling and then from 2 million to 3 million in year three. So 33%.
Anthony Vicino:
So like all told, we were able to do that ten X growth within three years with that strategy. So I just want to share this with you guys today because if you’re not careful, as you’re doing better in your businesses and cash flows coming in, you can start to get bloated a little bit loosey goosey with just throwing money at solutions rather than being diligent and asking, is this a necessary expense? Is there a cheaper, better or more resourceful way to solve the problem? If you do that consistently, then you will not find yourself in a position where your overhead is continually ballooning and you’re finding yourself struggling under the weight of expenses. So take this and do what you will with it. I appreciate you guys being here. I’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused my friends. Hey guys. I love, love, love that you’re listening to the podcast.
Anthony Vicino:
I truly hope it’s bringing you just a ton of value. But if you ever wanted to check out the video version of these podcasts, then you should head over to know they’re going to have more effects, more visual stuff like that. And that can help the message sometimes just hit a little bit different and reinforce the lesson in a better way. So you can check that out. It’s completely free. Go over to YouTube, search for Anthony Vasino, it’ll pop up and if that’s not what you’re into, then cool. Just enjoy the show and let’s get to it.
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