Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ryan Pope. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Ryan, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Our business’ story starts about 10 years before it was ever formed. It’s a tale of how a silly decision to be clever turned out to be one of the best things to ever happen to me.

I am originally from Jacksonville, FL and was raised with a small business owner parent. My grandfather started a business back in the 1950’s and it eventually made its way in the stewardship of my father roughly in the early ’90s. My dad is one of those types that is kind of gruff, tough it out sort of way. So, his way of raising me was always to teach me how to run a business or how to do negotiations etc. I knew far more about how to leverage a meeting more than throw a ball (thankfully, I was more into Ice Hockey and Crew than baseball).

When it came time to go off to college, I was fortunate to avoid that whole “what do you want to be when you grow up?” mentality. I already knew: I wanted to be like my dad and take over the family business. Instead of going to college to prepare for a career, I chose to use it as a challenge of sorts. Which is how I ended up going to the University of Florida for Mechanical Aerospace Engineering, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Decidedly NOT business in anyway.

However, I still needed those educational based business skills if I were to be successful in running the family business. I decided to dive right into obtaining my Master in Business Administration. Surprisingly to me at the time, there were a lot of parallels between solving engineering and business problems. It came as no surprise that I found great pleasure in looking at data or business intelligence and producing solutions.

This finally brings us to the sneaky, devilish, clever reason Out of the Box Advisors exists. And you have to remember that i was much younger and flashy… and maybe a bit cocky back then. When it was finally time to, hopefully, get a foot in at the family business I wanted to enter with some flare…

So I thought to myself, what would be the best way of proving to my father that I am capable and responsible enough to take over for him when he was ready? *poof* Out of the Box Advisors was born.

What better way to showcase my ability to Run the family business than to Run my own business, helping others Run their business!! Man… I just knew I was a genius in that moment.

Technically speaking, this business was never meant to be real and sustainable for the past 10 years. I had meant for it to be merely a showcase of my skills and commitment to business.

Then the damnedest thing happened. It turns out that what I was doing just resonated with me to my core. I found deep passion for helping others achieve their small business dreams.

It also happened to achieve my initial goal, landing me a sweet gig being the Chief Marketing Officer of the family biz. This led to the development of the prime ethos of Out of the Box Advisors: Taking the C-Suite experience of a $40M business and communicating those skills down to the “little guy” as it were.

Our foundation is to empower the average small business owner with the knowledge, experience, and foresight into how to grow their business with business coaching rooted in the C-Suite.

This is precisely what sets us apart from our competition. Whereas most business coaching firms operate by selling you courses or structured processes, we instead prefer to guide and advise the small business owner on a personal level. We work with them week over week not unlike a therapist; a business therapist! None of this ‘take this course and you’ll succeed’ mumbo-jumbo… true, real success.

Ryan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Sure. I think our backstory sums it up nicely, but perhaps I can talk a bit about the myself in terms of the business. I own and represent Out of the Box Advisors as its CEO. What we do is take the big corporation experience and provide that knowledge to the average small business. Our goal is to create wealth and success for the local business owners out there!

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Taking risks in business is really the default isn’t it? Even when it comes down to the simple things, you still take time to process and make sure you’re making the right choice. You don’t do that because it’s a perfectly safe decision.

Second only to Finance Risks, Marketing is a powerhouse of stress inducing decisions. Especially in this day and age.

As a small business coaching firm, we need to have the personal experience in all things business in order to best guide you to your own success. And I am here to tell you, we have our fair share of risk taking in the books. Some things led to failure (which is 100% ok, by the way) whereas other were highly successful.

However, today I want to share the story of how we were in over our heads, absolutely sure of failure, and through perseverance, we succeeded in spectacular form!

In a galaxy far, far away…. wait no, wrong story. In the land of DUUUUVALLL (thanks Jason Mendoza!) is where our story begins. This was in the first year of business. Landing those first few clients of a fledgling business is ultra critical, so the pressure was at maximum.

We were introduced to a small business who had an incredible problem to have. To put it into perspective, they essentially had Moby Dick hooked on the line, but that line was attached to one of those Walmart Barbie reels you use to teach kids how to fish. Our job was not only to help them reel it in, but deliver on the other end.

The client operated a retail store the size of, let’s say 1/5th a Blockbuster Video. However, the fish they were battling was looking for someone to distribute a hot new product. This product had multi-million dollar potential within a year, easy.

As you can see, it required some rock solid guts and determination to deliver.

What we needed to do was to fly out to meet with this manufacturer and negotiate a deal of some sort. The client had no clue what they were doing and was dropping this weight entirely on us. Here’s another little nugget, we signed with the client on Christmas Eve and were on a plane two days later.

In two days we had to establish a negotiating strategy, obtain representation in order to have contracts drafted, establish credibility with the other party, and somehow close this deal. The manufacturer wanted to have the deal done by the end of the year.

On the flight out to Arizona throughout the night at the hotel, the client and I worked fastidiously to cross all our T’s and dot all the I’s of our game plan. Our meeting the next day was a grueling, all-day long affair.

In the end of all that, we were able to not only get distribution rights, but we managed to negotiate conditional exclusivity!

However, our work and story didn’t end there. With the ink still drying, we had to fly home and somehow completely redesign the business to accommodate this new venture. With sales going live mid January, we had to THEN design a pricing model, obtain office space, staff the space with a sales team, create an online portal, and design fulfillment!

Phew, I get anxious just thinking about it even today!

But you know what, we absolutely killed it! Two weeks had gone by, and we had this small local business operating like a major distributor!

They ultimately went from a $250k per year retail space to over $5M distributor within a year.

The ultimate moral of the story here is to not be afraid to take risks. They don’t always pay off, but as long as you put in your absolute best, a lot of them will. But also, I can say with great confidence that if we had failed this scenario, I would still have taken the risk in retrospect.

Don’t be your own worst enemy. Take the risk.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Funding – the achilles heel of any entrepreneur.

For the average small business owner, this is always the highest bar to entry. You have the amazing idea, but you’re not flush with cash and rubbing elbows with millionaires. So, what to do?

Honestly, there’s no real easy answer here, but there sure is a ton of risk.

I was like all other potential business owners out there. I had a drive, an idea, and I needed to start this business ASAP. Fortunately, I had been working throughout college etc. and was smartly placing money in to my retirement accounts.

Messing with my retirement, what a moron you must think. But, sometimes its all you have to take that leap. And I absolutely was jumping head first into entrepreneurship, no question.

I ended up cashing out all of my saved retirement, paying all those hefty penalties. And when you’re first starting out, you don’t magically earn free clients. I had to not only fund the business, but also live on that money without letting it bleed me dry.

Never would I make this as my first suggestion for an aspiring business owner. The risks are astronomical; affecting your ability to live comfortably at retirement. However, I firmly support it if it’s the one choice you have.

The risk and stress that funding my business this way created was the driving force behind our success. It fueled our hunger to do what was needed to find those early clients. I firmly believe that every new small business owner needs to have at least something that teaches them that hunger. It truly separates the successful from the hobbyists.

Contact Info:

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