Start Scale Exit: How to Start, Build, and Sell a Business While Living the Life of Your Dreams

By Ryan Carroll

"Start Scale Exit" by Ryan Carroll is an indispensable guide for entrepreneurs at all levels, offering valuable insights and strategies for building and exiting a business successfully.

Contrary to popular belief, selling a business is not the only way to exit it, as entrepreneur and vlogger Ryan Carroll reveals in this eye-opening book. Drawing from his own experiences, Ryan shares his remarkable journey of exiting a multi-million-dollar business in his mid-twenties while retaining majority ownership and control.

Motivated by his aspiration to be a "thriving artist, not a starving artist," Ryan takes readers on a rollercoaster ride of his victories and setbacks as a young entrepreneur. Along the way, he imparts essential business advice that will inspire, entertain, and educate entrepreneurs at any stage of their wealth-building journey.

Each chapter of "Start Scale Exit" acts as a practical and comprehensive guide, presenting a step-by-step approach to starting, scaling, and ultimately exiting any business. Novice entrepreneurs will benefit from the breakdowns of fundamental concepts such as business formation and branding, while seasoned entrepreneurs will find validation or discover new directions to propel their ventures forward.

Ryan Carroll's expertise and achievements have garnered recognition, with his companies being featured in esteemed publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company, among others. His wealth of knowledge and proven track record make him a trusted source of guidance for anyone aspiring to build a thriving business and achieve financial success.

Whether you're a budding entrepreneur seeking guidance or a seasoned business owner looking for fresh perspectives, "Start Scale Exit" is a must-read. Ryan Carroll's unique blend of personal anecdotes, practical strategies, and professional insights make this book an invaluable resource for navigating the complex world of entrepreneurship and crafting your own path to success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350909326

Book preview

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© 2023 One World Publishing. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 979-8-35090-931-9 eBook 979-8-35090-932-6

Contents

Chapter 1

Why Even Read This?

Chapter 2

Conformity Is the Killer

Chapter 3

Rock Bottom

Chapter 4

Moment of Enlightenment

Chapter 5

START—How to Start Your Business

Chapter 6

SCALE—Offer and Marketing

Chapter 7

SCALE—How to Scale

Chapter 8

EXIT

Chapter 1

Why Even Read This?

At this very moment, are you living the life you’ve always wanted? Are you pursuing your passion and able to completely fund it yourself? If not, why?

Let’s be honest. Everyone in life wants to be financially free to do as they please—living a life of abundance and joy. Isn’t it weird how unrealistic the idea of doing so feels to most people? It’s almost unfathomable to think that you, as well as anyone else, could possibly live limitlessly unless they inherited billions. However, I’m here to help you not only believe that this is possible but also help you get there, and tell you step by step exactly how I accomplished this myself. I’m not anybody who is any more especially talented or gifted than you are. What I lack in talent I probably make up for in hard work, but that’s something you can do too. The only difference between me writing this book and you reading it was a clear vision, applicable steps, and a permanent decision that I made to be accountable for my own success or failure and create and live my life by design.

This book is designed for those who want to make the most out of life in the current social media era we live in. It will help you understand the blueprint behind how to build a modern and sustainable business that caters to today’s audience demographics. This book will also cover essential skills that must be developed to be truly successful in business. Lastly, this book will cover how I went from being in over $65,000 in debt to now making over $30 million dollars in just the past eight months since I started writing this book and the journey it took me to get there.

From living in my mom’s garage to now having my own penthouse in Miami, I’ll cover all the unpleasant and hard realities of what it took to live a life of abundance and financial freedom with the hopes that my story will help you do the same. While the journey will probably be the most stressful process you’ve ever endured, I promise it will grant you all your wishes if you can stick it out to the end. Take satisfaction in knowing that the harder the sacrifice, the greater the reward.

Before we go any further, I just want to say thank you for reading my story. My name is Ryan Carroll. I was born in March 1996 in Loma Linda, California. I was mostly raised by my mother, and although I didn’t grow up rich, or even middle class, I am grateful to her for everything she provided and all the risks and chances she took for me that allowed me to eventually break through. I have always had a calling in my heart to be wealthy. Most importantly to mention, I never have felt entitled to anything or expected the world to give me anything for free. I knew to get where I wanted to go was going to take hard work, persistence, dedication, determination, faith, and even some luck.

Like most of you reading this who want more for your life than just average results, you have probably tried your hand in a lot of different things trying to find something that works. Before getting into e-commerce, I worked at a surf shop, was a moderately successful real estate agent, tried wholesaling real estate, and tried to get rich quick on eBay. There are people who are wildly successful doing all of those things. It takes the right combination of a unique opportunity in the market, some unique skills to create some type of value, and sometimes just some dumb luck, to find the right vehicle to make a fortune from. For me, it was e-commerce and online marketing. However, that doesn’t mean that e-commerce is right for you or that it is the only way to get wealth in today’s world.

Even after discovering the vast potential of opportunities to become wealthy from e-commerce, it still took me a lot of trial and error to find the things that worked and figure out how I could create enough value to build long-term wealth from this. Even after I was able to do that, more than once, no success was permanent, and constant adaptation, analysis, and optimization was required to take things to the next level. Each time I have adapted, reanalyzed, and optimized my strategies and organizations, I find myself moving further from a place where crashing and falling to zero is possible, but from my experience, there has never been a time, no matter how successful I was in any project, where the trajectory of success was a straight line up.

There are two reasons behind me explaining this upfront here.

One is to emphasize that the fundamentals that will be explained in this book are not meant to apply solely to you starting an e-commerce store online, nor is this some sales pitch to try to convince you into investing or getting involved in online marketing. These are fundamentals that I applied to start, scale, and exit my businesses, and everything in this book is something that I wish had been simplified and explained to me in the beginning of my journey. Whatever vehicle toward building wealth in business you choose to follow, I am confident that these fundamentals will, at some level, give you insights you will benefit from in the three stages of the entrepreneurial journey that I feel are most commonly shared among all entrepreneurs.

Second, although I was able to create a lot of success in e-commerce, my intention is not to define myself or my entire career off the one company I am currently operating successfully that has had the most success to date. The purpose of this book is not for you to create a carbon copy of my company, but rather to share and instill in you key mindset attributes and a fundamental roadmap that will be valuable guiding principles for anyone looking to start a business, already running a business, or wondering what some options are to do next now that they have found success in business. Before going on in great detail about these specific insights, I will share a summary of them here below.

Our first lesson will be how to properly start a business. This will be more about how to identify an opportunity, finding something you are passionate about, and how to identify if an opportunity is worth focusing on. Although we will touch on it briefly, the technical details like which type of business entity to incorporate should be delegated out to a professional or do your own research; there’re endless textbooks and online content on the technical subject matter. Something more valuable that I can share with you is how to know which opportunities are a good fit for you, are a good use of your time, and will have enough room to scale and exit successfully.

The second lesson will be the action steps to scale your business once you have identified what may be the right business for you. Starting a business and scaling a business are two different skill sets and mindsets. That is why you see some people who are great at launching businesses or companies every few months or years, but they can never get them scaled large enough or consistent enough to get to the point of being able to exit. The scaling stage will prove one of two outcomes. The first is discovering you have created an actual business; something that is investable, sellable, and has an exit. The second is the trap many entrepreneurs find themselves in; the reality that they did not create a business and ultimately just created a job for themselves where they are responsible for everything. There is nothing wrong with being self-employed, or building a great source of income around a personal brand, but to exit a business, it has to be scaled properly to be recognized as an investable asset. After reading this book,