I Sold a Ski Resort To The Founder Of Netflix | $50M+ Exit

Jeff Bezos Richard Branson and Bill Clinton are just a few of the worldclass leaders today's guest has brought to the stage at a conference he created called Summit Our Guest for the show today is Ryan beelman he's a Serial entrepreneur and currently an executive coach to a lot of famous entrepreneurs Ryan grew Biz now media from $1 million to $20 million in Revenue leading it all the way till its acquisition he didn't stop there he and his Partners actually bought an entire ski mountain in Utah called Powder Mountain and po mounting got eventually acquired by the founder of Netflix Reed Hastings and in this conversation he shares insights into what it takes to build businesses and how he's living a very Balanced Life In Harmony and if you haven't already subscribe to the channel it helps us educate more people on the latest emerging [Music] technology I'm excited to have you on the show Ryan how are you feeling today I'm excited to be with you man it's good to finally hang out outside looking in my impression of you is like you were under this 10 15 years of Journey of like high energy like being on the stage like talking to hundreds of people and now I feel like you're the guy who like took a trip to East and zened out a bit went on this like spiritual journey with yourself is that a fair characterization yeah I guess you know the reason I'm on the the show I guess is I started a few companies and I sold them and I'm sort of most known I guess for this crazy acquisition of a ski resort in 10,000 acre mountain in Utah with my business partners in in 2012 which about 8 or N9 years later we sold to Reed Hastings the founder Netflix and you know in a lot of ways the thing I'm most proud of is actually building this other company bis now which is a became the largest publisher of commercial real estate news and hundreds of commercial real estate conferences for executives and but at the same time I ran Summit which is a very Progressive liberal ideas Festival it's basically a 3-day immersive experience for thousands of entrepreneurs artists academics once or twice a year people pay like 5,000 bucks for a ticket and it's done a lot of good it's spread a lot of ideas and but you know I got really interested in philosophy in junior high thanks to my English teacher who was wonderful that played to the seed set when I discovered Buddhism in my early mid-20s I got really excited about it the idea that you could control your mind but you can't control your external circumstances and then you had some agency over your well-being your happiness your perspective was really healing and really exciting to my young mind and I'm 42 now but from like 24 years old until probably like 39 I was basically obsessed with you know practice Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist practice you know daily and I learned a great deal from that I learned how to be a Quantus I learned how to be even killed disciplined able to self-regulate my emotions very quickly able to return very quickly from like an emotional state back to like a qulo present State and that was really good as a husband as a CEO who was under a lot of stress all day is under pressure your team wants consistency your team doesn't want you to be a radical all the time I I grew up in India like I spent 21 years of my life in India and I've experienced both sides so I've seen entrepreneurs and people in India like i' and I've experienced like the work culture in in us and it's very different I've seen more cases of substance abuse in us people on caffeine like stimulants this constant like stress bubble that they're in and moderation is not there at all especially with entrepreneurs I've seen seen like they always have this like sense of urgency but they have high IQ but not high EQ and as you said they're not able to like self-regulate and come back to the neutral state of mind so how do you get that does that come with experience or does that come by reading philosophy like how do you self-regulate it's a good question I think that slowing down taking a moment to breathe and sinking into the chest the solar plexus the stomach and of course your legs and your feet like there's a lot of information this whole nervous sort of network that's running through our whole body to me is like an extended brain I think of the body is like Google Drive it's like where we store a lot of data and the mind is maybe like where the CPU sits where we process data but and I think both are really important and so as you mentioned I now coach entrepreneurs and I'm always trying to help them slow down to learn how to feel which is a skill that can be developed we've sort of been taught not to track our emotions and and especially not ATT track other people's emotions like when you're a child your parents they don't want you noticing that they're angry or they're upset so we just learn not to notice and track these like even now I feel a little anxious like to be on a show you know oh like what's that like for my heart what's that like for my chest for my mind and through that you can become a little more regulated early on in the career like the advice is like yo you got to be obsessed with what you're building right forget your wife forget your kids forget your friends just forget everything completely lock yourself in a room work like you know that kind of thing and is that okay or is that going to traumatize you for the rest of your life you know I think that on the one end yeah I don't want people to feel like they're project to work so you have to work on your mental health you have to work on your physical like as if you're like this object that needs to be worked on all the time so what I've discovered is the psyche is a multiplicity and the parts of my multiplicity that are young playful curious connected to maybe nature to the Earth they don't generally want to be stuck in the dust like grinding now having said that I have other parts of my personality that love to grind love to obser love to work hard love to make money so I think that's wonderful and that kind of energy especially when you're younger and maybe when you're older too depending on the person is great like find outlets for it find places to go and be obsessive and work hard at things I think hard work is important I worked extremely hard through school through my 20s and 30s and now I work a lot less and I missed sometimes the grind in the hustle like it was nice having like people and I might return to that you know to me I think a lot of life is just both and start either oring I don't pretend to know how other people should live their lives so but for me like I I need to spend time with family and friends and but there's other times where I go on Sprints and I have to have boundaries with family and friends and say I just don't have space for time right now to except for you know maybe dinner each night and like an hour after but otherwise like I'm on a Sprint right now so you know I think it just there's Seasons to things and it takes sort of some nuance and some balance to at least that's how I think about it for my for myself and how I often you know notice it kind of works well for my clients we've seen this with podcasts and like newsletters once you land a big guest it causes that inflection point like Tim Ferris like his podcast was like very stagnant for 3 years then he landed Arnold and then it like took off and then he landed Jamie Fox and it took off again for Summit how were you able to land these big guest was it through personal connections or was it through cold Outreach it's funny to say that I would say one inflection point for us was having Bill Clinton keynote Summit in 2010 but if I rewind 24 months before that when was birth he was my co-founder Elliot cold calling Zuckerberg the founder of guitar Hera the founder of YouTube the founder of you know all these things right and most of those people either didn't take his call didn't call him back or said you know maybe or no but 19 people said yes and those 19 people came on a first ski trip and because they love the ski trip they said you know we'd like to invite friends to the next one so now you're working with like this powerful network of 19 people who of course each know some powerful and interesting people so once you we build trust with them they helped deliver those people to our Mexico Summit which was about four or five months later then we had 85 World Mexico then Dustin mosc with you know the co-founder Facebook came Chaka came you know who packed I think Twitter early right he was like Google like because they were friends with some of the first 19 people right and then those people said they invited their friends to our Aspen Summit where we had 140 people one of the people who came to Aspen was this guy who helped create the Obama campaign that like the Hope logo and like that symbol and that sort of movement around like creating hope at the time and so when Obama took office through that connection we were able to get like sort of a meeting with his new sort of cabinet for the people at Summit which gave us basically a blank check to call people and say people we could never reach or people who told us no hey do you want to come meet the new white house here's 20 amazing people who are already said yes people who' obviously now come to our prior events so now there's social proof right they want to come so now they come because of that someone in Bill Clinton's office in Harlem at the time heard that we had connected some of the new like Obama had a new head of social which no one had ever had before so Clinton's Foundation was like oh this is interesting we want to connect with entrepreneurs because we have initiatives that entrepreneurs could plug into so that's how we got so then we had a special dinner with Bill Clinton he came he liked the dinner we said why you come to one of our big events where you can have a bigger impact meet more entrepreneurs and then we were able to use Bill Flint's name came to Market hey now we're doing an even bigger event with Bill Clinton keot which you know at that time was probably even more relevant than it is now so we went from 100 some attendees to 750 attendees on that amount and then we announced that we do Summit AT C we're to take people to a destination on Noah on a cruise ship well no one had really done anything like that at the time like so you know that was less a person but more just like Hey we're going to do something crazy basically and so you know we were really good at playing that game of delivering real value like obviously when people come if it's not awesome and great they're not connecting back and and basically building inroads into new communities like building inroads into the music industry building inroads into the entrepreneur community in Europe and in Tel Aviv in Dubai and then you know those nodes have friends I think the leveraging like a big name cuz a lot of people just want to be like yo I want to see Bill Clinton live and probably other people who want to see Bill Clinton live will also be like me and interesting and I'll probably get along with them and they're my people cuz they're curious about the same thing thank you so much Ryan for coming on the show I really appreciate your time so many good lessons in this episode so how can people find you like on what platform are you active it's Ryan beagle withm name.com and all there you can email me and I love having coaching clients I'm usually kind of of somewhat full but I love making room for new clients so I coach all kinds of people you don't have to be an entrepreneur but I do tend to work more with entrepreneurs because it is a bit of a financial investment to work with me and and I love helping supporting people with their journey and their growth in building things and transformation and transition their career what whatever it might be so if I can be helpful to more people that's great that's why I come out podcast and try to share some of the you know the last things of my own life and I'm wishing you all the best and thank you for making dive your it