The Billion-Dollar Standard: How Ryan Serhant Built a Brand That Won’t Stop | Ryan Serhant

The Entrepreneur DNA, welcome back. Obviously, you are seeing I'm with a very special guest here. He is not just a TV star. He is a Netflix star. He's a best-selling author. He's a tech CEO. He's a top broker. He's an investor, an entrepreneur, a father, a husband, just an overall great guy. Ryan Serhain is here. Thanks. Yeah, I'm excited to have this. This is going to be a good one. Yeah, welcome to my office. That's it. This is an incredible office, So if you ever get the chance, we're here in New York in his office. Phenomenal. This place is unreal. You're nines all the way through and through. I want to ask you the first thing first. I just gave you a resume. How do you get all this done? People. Power in people. Power in numbers. Scale. One of the first things I learned when I got into the real estate business in 2008, when I looked around at everybody else that I was competing with, and I saw that there was this real nobility in being able to do everything by yourself. So that was a thing. I hit the ball by myself. I did the work by myself. I think there might be another way, especially in the service business, which is hard because everyone wants you. It's you, me, you, you, you. How do you scale you? If you know how to train and you know how to teach, like if you look at any great manager, some managers show, some managers tell, the best one is teach. jeez, learn how to teach, then you can start to create different branches to, you know, your oak tree. Um, and so I've just always really focused on the fact that I can hire people to do everything but hire people. And so I just spent a lot of time finding and looking for great people and they helped me do all of that stuff. Yeah. I mean, even if you just consider some of the, the things people know you for. You are a content creator. You are top of the spear of the content creating world, in my opinion. That is not easy. You're a best-selling author. You are on a million-dollar list in New York. You have Owning Manhattan, season two coming out now. December 5th, season two, Owning Manhattan. Like, just that alone, in anyone else's world, is a full-time job, right? To be able to keep up with that. So, take that, and then you actually still do the thing that you're known for. You have to. And that is something that I give you as someone I've been in the real estate space for 20 years. I give you all the credit because there's so many people now that are trying to become branded like a sirhant, but they stop doing the thing. And that's a tricky spot. Yeah. Yeah, I think the audience and the community that we build now really, really see through bullshit and they really understand authenticity. like they just get it you know like you you know when things are produced you know when people are full of it you just get it it's why swipe time now is so fast yeah because you just know like fake fake fake fake authentic and we all pause on authentic moments it's why even in the age of ai we just all get locked out reality tv is the biggest right now across streamers and cable because even if moments are put together and produced and hey, go stand over here, there's more authenticity there than in someone paying to make content, to put it in front of you, to please like it so we could sell ads. No one cares anymore. Right. And so I still have to do the thing. And I also, I think it's important to make sure that I never lose touch with every single part of the business and what makes it run. And there's credibility in the fact that if I'm going to teach people how to sell, I need to actually be selling. I don't want to be your coach. And I never was able to listen to people or learn from people who were like, well, I've never done this personally, but it's like a personal trainer who's out of shape. They might be book smart. You talk about that, right? But they might be book smart, but I'm like, you got to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk at least once to say, this is how you did it right right and then goes with that process i just a fun story i was just in the gym this morning i do a morning routine i want to get to your morning routine but i go to the gym very early because i'm also a father and i run companies and i need fine time uh this older guy huge beer belly maybe one day he was in shape somewhere but not anymore is talking to this shredded ripped we're in the sauna sauna this guy has an eight pack he's like 25 years old at most like just shredded yeah he says hey weren't you that guy uh running up and down the street on whatever street for like an hour and a half doing wind sprints and the kid's like yeah that's my sunday routine to keep my body in motion yeah the older gentleman decides to go on a 30 minute and i was only in the sauna for 15 i would i left and he was still going rant on teaching him what he what would make him better yeah and i was looking at this guy with a huge beer belly trying to give the guy that has an eight pack advice on how to be more athletic and stronger and more fit and you go what the fuck is that so anyways uh so let's talk about a morning routine because i think again father business owner you got a million people needing you wanting you you're leveraged what does a morning routine look like for ryan's her hand well say when i was younger like definitely when I first moved to New York City, I was not used to the pace of the city because the city moves incredibly quickly. It will provide you all the fuel you need to power the fastest car or it'll provide you all the gas you need to burn your fucking house down. Right? And you get to choose. You get to choose go fast or you get to choose break down lane. I am dying. I'm depressed. I have to move home. I'm using this by the way. The city is both. And so when I first got here I was like like 9 a.m. is a good like it's early but you know that's morning i would go to the gin at night okay my gym on the upper east side when i first moved here we close at 10 i get there about like 8 30 p.m yeah um because the thought of doing anything before 8 a.m was just like you'd have to i would have to be forced yeah um and then i get a job and responsibility and then i started to learn the value of minutes and time and i started to build out like my thousand minute rule of because I control what I can control. I can only control my time. And so how do I control what only I can control? If I can't control the weather, I can't control markets. I can't control a grandmother who's going to lie to my face to save $5. I can't control him. I can't control you. I can control my time. And so let me maximize my lifespan with the amount of time that I have. And so I flipped it and I did the inverse. And so my meditation, like my church is plus minus 5 to 8 a.m. Okay. Roughly. Yeah. Definitely 5 to 7, depending on the day, but 5 to 8. I wake up at 4.30, six days a week. I like wake myself up. I read. I look at email. I look at the news specifically, see what happened overnight, kind of catch up, and I start firing off messages. It's what I've done for like 17 years. It's important to me. Everyone, they're all saying yes. It's important to me to let everybody know that I won and I beat you. it's a small joy in my life to let everyone know that by the time they wake up yeah they're looking down they're like oh he's had a two-hour head start you literally sometimes say i went no i've never actually said that you should like it's implied yeah with my emojis um but i also have listen i also have clients all over the world so like especially in europe especially in the uk they're five six seven hours ahead of us already yeah so like i just have i got in the cadence when I was much younger to just move that fast. So only now are people like, dude, with the iOS update, you can use send later. And like, that's for pussies, you know? Like, that's an extra set for meat. A hundred percent. That's right. I get it. Work-life balance. Questionable that you can post this. So I do all that stuff up until 530, depending on the day. I'll go to a big gym that's by my house and I'll work out. I get, if I'm in New York, like a standard day, work out there from like 5.30 to 7.00, I come home, shower, see wife, see baby, bring a hot second, get in the car, go to work, and then I'm 15 minutes on the mark for the most part. This is four 15-minute blocks. Yeah. It's one to two. Other than that, we keep things pretty tight. And your dials. Yeah. Yeah, dials. So the question you brought up was this balance. So I wanted to go off on this because I think everyone that wants to be Ryan Serhant doesn't know how to even get to become Ryan's right without, they believe, I have a strong opinion. I don't believe there's balance. You have one life and you're all in on family and you're all in on work. And it's one life. There is no like family life work balance in my opinion. Do I want to spend time with my kids and my wife? A hundred percent. But when I'm there, then I'm all in on them. When I'm here in office, let's say, then I'm all in on this. How do you view this work-life balance? Because you have a million things, far more than most people watching this and hearing this. How do you do this work-life balance? Presimably, I am very goal-oriented. I definitely can't be with anybody who is all simpatico, who just wants to go with the wind. Maybe that'll be in my second life. I do think about those people and I envy them. I'm a friend-for-oriented. I know where I want to get to this year I know what the chapter in my book for 2025 is going to be And I know that there going to be twists and turns and there going to be good stories and then some bad stories because that what makes a book interesting I also read a book that like and then everything was awesome. No one watches that Netflix show for sure. They want to watch where everything fucking burns, but he came out a bit alive. And so I plot the goals and the goals are personal and professional. Okay. Personal is Ryan and then family. family, professional, is CEO and a company. So I have four quadrants. What are those goals for the year? And I march towards those goals. Do you physically write them? Oh, for sure. And I keep everything in focus at all times. That way, when everyone brings me different issues, those issues are not a focus and the focus will not be that issue. And then I get to just move forward that way. And that way I can plot out. And then obviously things happen and things change and things move around and that's okay but like i wanted to make sure last year that i spent more time with my grandmother this year who lives in mequan wisconsin which is nowhere near me um because she's turning 100 and so she did turn 100 and i was just in milwaukee and yeah dude i think there's like hurricanes in the midwest everywhere now dude it's insane god is saying you guys fuck this world up dude okay i might as well it's been in miami milwaukee was underwater could barely get back to the airport but i saw nana it was on my goals but i also wanted to um uh to make sure that that happened so that i can then follow the follow the plan that's kind of how i do so much to unpack because i just did the same thing with my wife my grandfather's 96 now right and i'm like i need to get my happy ass all the way to california and just sit with a 96 year old yeah and just talk because they talk and just yeah and it's just like peaceful you just sit there and go oh all my stresses i'm just here with a 96 year old so hopefully you found the same thing uh you're not me it's nuts like i everyone i know over the age of 70 if you ask them like what's the way every time man if you ask them what's the one thing that they would change for the most part it's have more kids right for the most that's really what you had to say what that's what you had to say right now. Sorry. We have two. Yeah. For the most part, it's having more kids because it's like, like I said, I talked to a CEO. We sold his house for a billion dollars. And I was asked, like, what's one piece of advice you have for me between now and the time I get to your age, you know, old man. He's like, have more kids. He has five. Like, dude, really? And he's like, yeah, but I don't regret a single one of them. Right? And the pain that I had when raising them, whether it's financially, for sure, because raising kids these days is obscenely explosive. Okay, what? Whether it's the pressure on your time or everything, we're all going to hit an age, if you're lucky, where all that stuff is meaningless. All those people are gone. The stress is gone. The work is gone. The stuff is gone. They're going to be old. You're back. You're going to sit there. All you're going to have is your kids. And I'm sitting there at my grandmother's birthday, and it affected me three weeks ago, or whatever that was. And she's 100 years old, and she has five kids. and they're all there, one of which is my mom. And all the grandkids, she doesn't know who anybody is. And then she falls asleep and she wakes up and she's like, I know who all of you are. It was kind of fun. I was like, ooh, which grandmother are we going to get right now? She's 100. And it's like, wow. Man. And nothing that happened to her when she was 40 years old that was really stressful that day. At work at her job, it means anything in that moment. So my really long answer to your question about work-life balance and everything else is, yes, it's goal-oriented, but I put in the work every day for future me. Like, that's my job. That's who I work for is me at 75 who's somewhere in the future, old as buck, who really wishes that I wasn't doing snatches, okay, at the gym at my age because now his shoulders. How are your shoulders? Yeah, yeah, yeah. you know, and he's sitting there, but I hope he's happy and surrounded by people and not sitting there alone at some desk saying, yeah, but look, right. I think the, yeah, but look fear of embarrassment is 100% an epidemic that we have to fix. And now I'm going on a tangent and I'm going to stop. So I have, I, I have a, uh, concept that I really hold near and dear to my heart but I want to get your perspective of this it has to do with the balance but like I love my children and my wife more than anything and there are times right now more than anything she's right there but I will tell you I'm not built to be a dad the same way she is a mom for sure I literally have been judged because I've come out on my social medias and basically said listen I love them but if I can rock an hour or two and give them all hour or two I got yeah I'm gonna have a great fucking day and if that was that's perfect for me yeah because we think we battle man we have to go fight dragons all day long and I can't do more I'm not built to do more do you agree disagree what's your thoughts on all that my wife first introduced me she's from Athens and she used to me to her dad and she'd always called him Leo and he introduces himself as Leonidas I was like dude you've gained leonitis is my potential father-in-law he doesn't fight anybody now but i'm like man yeah we gotta go out we have to hunt and gather and um uh i think it's in the dna i think listen there's a little bit of like nature nurture as well right and you do become who you were raised by and so we probably had similar upbringings like all i remember is my dad waking up at 5 a.m., having a banana, like going to work, traveling around the world two weeks out of every single month, um, us being with my mom and coming back. We had to do school reports every single day. We had to do chores and everything on the weekends all the way through college, if he was going to pay for it. And work is worthy, the value of a dollar, because they went through the great depression. You know, his mom died when he was fucking 16. He had his first kid when he was 19, like just a different world to live in. You know, his dad had polio and the wars and all that stuff. And so like, we're raised by that. And so when we get out of school, it's like, oh, shotgun time to go and do the things. And then to not do that is really, really just, I don't know, genetically uncomfortable. But then there's also the, the, the nurture part of it, which is learning to adapt with a changing, a changing world and making sure we are there more than the 47 minutes that I think I read today that said, that's all you need to be there for your spouse for them to still love you. Shut up. Yeah, I forwarded that. I forwarded that. I was like, listen, it is science. Yeah, science. I think her response was, when was the last time you talked to me for 47 minutes? And I was like, undue send, undue send, undue send. Damn it! It backfired. Ah, too good. Well, so let's go into a little bit about challenges. We talked a little bit about it, but when you're faced with like something goes wrong, a deal blows up in front of your face. I mean, this literally is a little raw for me because yesterday I had just a seven figure. Oh, dude. Every day. Every day. How do you handle it? How do you compose? How do you handle? How do you deal with it? How do you just like, what does that look like for you? Well, at the beginning of my career, it could not. And I think the reason there's such churn in sales is that we are conditioned to become most improved players and most valuable players. And we all get good enough grades to get out of elementary school. And we're all told that we're going to be great and we're beautiful little pumpkins and everyone gets a trophy. Right. And I'm not the only person to say everyone says that. And so then you get into a success based economy. That's a merit based economy. you're like oh wait a minute i can't get there unless i do stuff um and then what happens if the stuff doesn't work out but my brain already moved up there and then we have a mental happiness detachment um that for me was really hard especially moving to new york city to try to be an actor because that's what i came here to do yeah and so i had two years which is not a long period at all where I was rejected to my face because of my face, you know, and I went great when I was 16, man. Like I, I, you know, I, and I realized very quickly that I was not as great an actor as the people in New York city that were incredible, you know, and tons and tons of rejection every day. And so you build up a thick skin. And then I got into real estate and I saw that in this business, people don't like the rejection. They don't like not being paid. They don't like not having benefits. They don't like not having their weekends. And so they quit. That's why it's like 90% of the people that get into this business are out of the business in the first couple of years. It's just, it's just, it's just hard. It's terrible. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend it to most people. Um, but for those that can make it through it's endurance for the win And what I taught myself is two things One is one is mindset One tactical So mindset for how to get over loss is flipping it to understand that my job is to lose If I think my job is to win every deal or to win most deals, then I'll be devastated when I don't because in my brain, oh, that was my job. And his deal went through, he made money. So if I make it that my job is to lose, my job is to pitch and not get it, then okay i did my job today every win then becomes a bonus and that really really really helped me whether it's employees quitting or team members leaving or deals not going through everything now it's just that's the job it is literally what i'm here to do is to try so hard that things don't work out so much so that enough really does so that's mindset tactically I started doing a thing a while ago where anytime something really bad happens I lose a deal, someone does something to me I go on my phone and I go into my calendar and I go 30 days from today right, so whatever day today is I'll go 30 days out and I'll just say read me and I just fucking unload I'm like this motherfucker this deal died, I hate it I hate this, I hate this person he sucks and I just unload everything I feel and then and then i have to go to my next appointment right i move on and then 30 days later i look at my calendar and it's that day and i see her read me and i'm like no shit and i open it i'm like well god oh i fixed it oh i don't care anymore because i did 10 more deals since then oh yeah that deal was never gonna go it's totally fine because time heals all wounds and now i don't care and so what happens when you do that the more you do it the muscle memory you build from just Retyping the note is a little bit of a spiritual guidance to your heart because you now know in 30 days, I'm not going to care. So future me is going to show up today, not 30 days from now. And right now, I already don't care as much because my job is to lose and I know what's coming anyway. Yeah. Right? It's like when you go through a breakup and you're like, I'll never date anyone. My life will be over. And the next day you meet someone, you're like, dude, she is, wow. Imagine if I was still with that. So like, it's just keeping that thing going. And that's how I get through it. That's, I mean, that's, I'm going to adopt that. Thank you for that. That was great. Cause it is that like you, like yesterday I wanted to go and I was flying here and I want to spend time on the white and it's literally a multiple seven figure fuckery that just explodes. And I go always here. We're going to martini. Got it. Let's go. but you got to be able to remind yourself, like I've been doing it 20 years. You've been like, you always get through it and you always get through these things. The opportunity to be in the room to talk about that deal means that those deals are going to come and more of them are going to come. And the next one's going to be a little easier. It's just not going to look like the one you thought you were going to put together. Like always, I always thought I was convinced I'm a real estate broker in New York before I started this company. One day I'm going to do a deal for a hundred million dollars. I have to, right. If I'm going to be the best and i was the best i'm gonna do it the first hundred million dollar deal i knew was in florida and and i was not a broker in florida when i did it and let's see your book yeah i've read all for your books oh thanks on the way get all three of his books if you're watching this listening to this it doesn't matter the probably best business books brand it likes our hand was phenomenal when i get into this i don't know appreciate that we're gonna get into that sell like sorry i'm going to get into sales now in lai yeah sorry go ahead about your but you No, no, but like, so, so what I'm saying is the goal is to, to do a deal of that size. You put it out there, you think about it a little bit every day and it's now in the world. It's going to happen. You just don't know when it's going to happen. Like, you know, there's a finish line to the race. I just, I thought it was going to be over there because that's what that guy said. But actually it's over there. And so I'm going to run that way. And holy shit, we just won the race. And I just, I just know it's fine. Like, as long as you just keep running and you don't stop. That is the number one way to not win is to stop. That's it. As long as you keep running, I know that running over a long period of time is really hard. And most people aren't going to run that far or that fast or that hard. And slowly but surely, they will drop off or in our business, go to jail. I will do that business and win. Yeah. Do you do like vision boards and say, hey, I want to do this $100 million deal or maybe not cars at your level no i could i just personally haven't i know i know a lot of people who do and it's great they've had their vision board is their you know their wallpaper on their phone or their you know their yeah because you always think back to like drake's screensaver was that house and then he bought that house which is cool you know fun stories like that um i've always been a big like written goal guy like it's even even down to you know now that we have this whole company right and i have these department meetings and these division meetings and these function meetings and And like, I make sure in every agenda is the annual goal. We will never not think about it. I will never not pass it over. I don't want to have any meeting where we're just going to talk about stuff or anything. Are we marching towards that goal? Right. So that way everybody knows. And then when we cross it, great. Now we get to accelerate it. You know, that's, that's what we do. So I have five laws of success. First law of success, decide what you want, who you need to be to get it. Commit to it. Take action. Obvious. Be extremely uncomfortable. And this is where I think some of your brilliance is, is you keep pushing your own needle and it's uncomfortable, but you keep going anyways. And I think for those of you watching this and wanting to be like a Ryan or even a me at a smaller level, we're always uncomfortable because we're pushing our own levels. And that's uncomfortable because we've never been there. Right. And lastly, you touched on it. Why I brought it up was remove your time expectation on the result you're trying to achieve. Because if you just say you were saying like you always have a year end goal that you're going for, that's great. but if you could just do it faster, why don't you do it faster? Why do you have to wait for the year? It's Parkinson's law, which says that everything you set out to do is going to take exactly as long as you said you were going to do it. That's right. If it's going to take you 30 days, it's going to get done in 30 days because you have 30 days to do it. If you can say, I can go do that in 24 hours, you're going to get it done. You see that in content all the time. All the time. You could take a week to do it, but you can also do it by tomorrow. Yeah, or today, right now on your phone, just whip it out, right? These guys. I was the same way in college. If I had a semester to write a 15-page paper, guess when I started writing this same paper? Yeah, the night before. Yeah. Like, all nighters. Oh, ripped them. Right. Right until my senior year when I got caught plagiarizing because I was so tired. I just took the book. What's your GPT? The OG. Oof. Literally out of books in a library. I was like, how did they find that? It's wild stories. Oh, they're going to be great. They're going to be so impressed with Dad. But I'll be able to give good advice. Let's put it that way. Great advice coming from me. We have Only Manhattan Season 2 coming out. Yeah. Excited? Ready? Yeah, this stuff takes forever. You talk about timelines and things faster. It just, you know, we... Yeah, I started with Netflix in 2022. Season 1 did come out until June of 2024. And as you're right, it drops all at the same time. And you kind of have like a couple weeks of when it's there. and then there's 7,000 other shows that come out. And it worked. It worked. I really pushed to create something that was additive to the pop culture landscape. I do not want to do something I've done before. And I think because I'd done Millionaire Listing for 10 years, I wasn't going to go do that again. So it had to be different. It had to be a different journey, a different story. And so season two is complete insanity. I've seen it now. it's wildly crazy it is very scary and i don't know i hope people like it what do you mean it's scary like you lived it already what yeah this isn't you doing real estate you running a team you running an organization because it's so real yeah it's so vulnerable it's like most people like listen you're gonna edit this and you're gonna put this out yeah you're gonna watch it You're good. You're probably good out. It's an interview. Less scary. You're not saying anything in here that's like, man, I wonder if that's going to be right. In this show, there are no boundaries. And there are things that happen. There are scenes. There are things that are said that make me very nervous. Sure. Like how people are going to, because it's not just me anymore as an agent, right? Now it's the company, the brand, the people. it's one piece of content to cross eight hours that we drop to 300 million people on one day and everyone who's involved in this company has to be cool so like you know and there's it's uh everyone had to sign off right some sort of oh i mean if you're on camera yeah yeah yeah um that yeah now yeah now i understand why it'd be scary because there's just times where i even even a content clip where i say some vulnerable shit like talking about like i'm not meant to be Mr. Superdad all the time. I'm like, I'm going to get, I'll lose some followers. But I can only imagine exposing, how long was the recording? Season one was one year. Of recording? Oh yeah of filming because we were trying to figure out what the show was while we were making it It like a business It was a startup show Like we they greenlit doing a show called house of Suriant about me selling real estate with agents in this building. So it's called Suriant House, all of our clubhouses. That's what they're called. Suriant House, New York, Suriant House, Miami, all that stuff. And, and then, but like, we didn't want it to be million dollar listing. It was a big thing for me. Yeah. And I was really annoying about, I'm not doing that show 2.0. It must be different. It must be something. I want to make sure when people watch this show, they're introduced to me in a way that had never been introduced before or they have no idea what they just watched. And a lot of the press and the feedback we got was exactly that. It's like, I don't, it's not reality TV. It's not scripted. It's a new genre of like occupational docu- So, like it's just, I think there was a Variety article, or maybe it was in Vogue or something, that was like, this show charts a new path for what docufollow can look like, which was the biggest compliment I could have gotten because I spent two years of my life making it. season two we knew what we're making now so i spent six months checking color and shots and interview preps and all that so i could go in and just spent six months just going fucking ham creating the absolute most entertaining and scary show possible it's funny i'll tell you you did a brilliant job season one and the reason why i can say that is because this woman over here did not know you for million dollar listing and i said hey i'm in real estate so i love these shows and got to know your $3 million thing, and we watched Owning Manhattan. And it was like every night, hey, let's go watch that Ryan guy again, right? And I'm like, fuck yeah, let's ride, right? You fired a tattoo guy. Oh, that was a big thing. That's weird. Yeah, yeah. Have you circled around? Have you seen that guy again? Just wait. Okay, just wait. Got it. We'll keep that secret for a little while. Yeah. Well, I would ask probably the last question to kind of leave you, and I know you're time blocked, and what do you see next you've done some amazing shit dude and i've you and i've talked to a lot of great people doing amazing shit do you see bigger do you see push to to more do you see perfect what you built what do you see is like the next chapter for ryan as a person as a ceo the tech founder as an author like bro you got a lot this resume is big what do you see the next season for I'm good on writing books for a minute. Bro, it's brutal. I wrote a book. It took me a whole year for one book. It's a lot of work. Yeah, it's a lot of work. So I'm good on writing books. We're going to put three. I actually wrote a new chapter for Cell X Sirhand. We're going to re-release it as part of a box set in December when the show comes out. That is all about how to sell using AI. Because I sell to a lot of tech people. Right, AI apartments. Yeah. And they all then read my books, which is incredibly uncomfortable. Because they know how I talk. And I'm like, wait, wait, you can't know my secrets. I use those to make this deal happen. And they're like, no, no, no, no. AI is going to replace a lot of jobs, just like every technological invention is done over the course of history. But it doesn't replace houses, and it doesn't replace the skill set of selling, human to human. Yeah. And so, yeah, there's a cool new... We could do a whole other episode in a couple months about that. I think that would be an interesting episode on your frame on that. Yeah, that'll disperfect its all. There you go. Um, listen, I, I think I'm, I kind of, like I said, a pretty goal oriented, you know, my 2000, 2010 to 2020 was to become the best real estate agent I could at the top of the market to be number one in the United States. Right. If I could do a billion a year in sales plus on my own with a team help, that would get me there. So I did that. Now the goal is to become the best real estate firm, the best CBO that I can in the country by 2030. If I can do that, then the possibilities are endless, I think. I think our metrics are incredibly strong. We're moving incredibly fast. Our customer acquisition cost is zero. And is that all based around your brand? your ability to be a content creator that did it the right way and was authentic and it drives that amount of traffic everything we do here is inbound right the goal is to build leave flow in your sleep yeah and so my problem is growth my problem is supporting the growth that's right and so i'm excited about the next couple years in aligning like our companies now with with the people that we'll really understand that what got us here doesn't necessarily get us there um and just don't go for broke man take big swings you know i love that that is because why not what's the worst that happened you're gonna die i mean i could die i could death depends what swing you're taking i got an mri yeah today we came back clean but i do are you being in your health because i did the same thing i did a whole ct scan i went to every office see i went to texas to do this because i wanted a ct not an mri of your whole body because the ct can get your heart and it can get everything yeah i do that every other year because the radiation but yes yeah i'm big on that because i want to be around i don't want to just be here for a short time i want to be here for a long time yeah i'm the opposite i was kind of like i have to fucking stay really wanted to have that sit down really guys i'm out yeah daddy's gone because of the record yeah it's a bit rough you guys have killed me if you can give those people who are aspiring to be bigger content creators I believe full heartedly you got to build your personal brand what can you speak to branding you've been brilliant at it talk a second about branding before we leave here the power of it the need for it what to lean into do you lean into your company do you lean into your personal brand of Ryan Serhant what can we leave the listeners and watchers of this that's a little good question it is you wrote a book on him get his book that question is not just buy his fucking book you'll get the point but here's in a minute or two um i don't actually know what a content creator is in a bubble right other than someone who is taking videos or taking photos of a thing or a person and putting it out to the world and asking the world to pay attention to me okay so that's kind of like the tool. I think what are we trying to do across social and platforms, trying to create attention or trying to build community, trying to build audience. And we do that because you're getting followers, right? But followers do what? Followers are following leaders, right? Yeah. You're either a leader or you're a follower. And so you have to make a choice. You're either going to be a follower, which means you're going to do a lot of copycat stuff. Yeah. or you can be a leader, you can carve your own path. I think the best leaders, who then therefore are potentially the best content creators, but I would not look at myself as a content creator or look at myself as a leader, a subject matter expert, right? I think the best leaders, let me say it this way. I think good leaders convince everyone else to believe in you. I think great leaders, the best ones, convince everyone else to believe in themselves. And that's what makes great content that you want to follow, that you want to listen to. I have no interest in swiping through and being like, oh, his life is great. I have interest in seeing people where I'm like, man, my life could be great. Yeah. Right? Because everybody is just stuck between two years, if they're lucky. And that's where I think people need to take a step back and focus. stop focusing on the output and start focusing more on what even is that input that makes you a leader that should create a following, even if it's small. I think it should be small, right? There's riches and niches that way. And that's how you create that authenticity. That's why we have our audience. That's why you have yours. That's why my guy Hormozy has his. People follow authenticity. All of us here are here in part in some way because of Gary. like in some way you know there's no doubt early early early influencer and casey right like those guys that carve path and i you can really build something on the back of community but you have to pick your lane i'm a follower i'm a leader if i'm going to be a leader then i need to produce stuff that makes everyone feel great about that not about me and brother that was phenomenal guys this episode uh you don't even know half the shit we said behind the scenes but But if this was pretty cool and you like this guy, Ryan Soran, I'd love for you to share it with two people because owning Manhattan season two comes out December 5th. Get his books. If you believe in branding, if you're watching, listen to this probably because you believe in me and follow me. Make sure you follow him, but get his book. It talks all about branding, the power of it. I appreciate you guys. See you on the next episode. Thank you. 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