In this episode of the Lever Up Podcast, we sit down with Ryne Ogren, a former professional baseball player turned private equity investor. After a successful career as a shortstop and catcher with the Seattle Mariners and Baltimore Orioles, Ryne made a bold pivot into the world of digital marketing and inorganic entrepreneurship. He shares his unique journey from the baseball field to acquiring and scaling digital marketing agencies in Tampa, Miami, and Philadelphia. We dive deep into his experiences in deal sourcing, business acquisitions, and overcoming challenges in B2B marketing, along with his strategies for building successful businesses. Listen to Ryne’s insights on transitioning from sports to entrepreneurship, the importance of consistent marketing, and how his baseball background shaped his private equity approach.
Key topics include:
- Ryne Ogren’s journey from professional baseball to digital marketing investments
- How Ryne sourced and acquired three digital marketing businesses in 12 months
- The importance of sales and marketing skills in small business acquisitions
- The impact of B2B marketing, lead generation, and SEO on business success
- Lessons from deal negotiations and client management in private equity
Connect with Ryne Ogren: Follow Ryne on X at @RyneOgren and check out his website https://www.ryneogren.com/
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Listen to the podcast here
From MLB To Millions: Ryne Ogren’s Leap Into Business
We’re sitting down with Ryne Ogren, who’s got a great background in digital marketing. He used to be a professional baseball player and is an investor. He’s made a couple of introductions to us for investments. We started prosecuting, which is super exciting. It’s one of the people who helped me see what the power of the X platform could be. We’re super excited to sit down. I would love to hear your story first of all.
Ryne’s MLB Journey
What’s going on, SGC nation? Ryne Ogren here. My background is fairly interesting. I played professional baseball for four years with the Seattle Mariners organization for the first and then got traded over to the Baltimore Orioles for the next three. I was a shortstop. The Orioles turned me into a catcher. I had to figure out how to catch. Long story short, I did it. I had a successful career. I got out so I’m a voluntary retired. I quit baseball. We can go into more depth on this in a second.
I knew there was something else out there for me. I knew there was some bigger fish to fry, maybe some bigger dreams to accomplish. I started looking at getting into some private equity investments. I spent twelve months trying to get my first deal across the line. At that time, I became good at sourcing deals and eventually got my first deal across the line.
It was a minority stake investment in a digital marketing agency here in Tampa. We got that deal across the line twelve months after quitting baseball, which is pretty quick for most searchers. I quickly did my second deal four months after that in Miami with RocketFuel. In my third deal, I closed another digital marketing agency up in Philadelphia, Rise Marketing. I’m off to the races.
I got seven questions. You said shortstop to catcher. What is that transition like? A shortstop, and you can make an argument, is one of the more important positions. You go over to a catcher. What is that like? Your muscle memory is done.
Your muscle memory is toast. The position is completely different but you can make the argument that catcher is the most important position on the field versus a shortstop. The way they were looking at it with me as I had good hands and footwork but I was slow as far as what shortstops and second basemen are. They were looking at it that I also had a good arm. Maybe if I was behind the plate, I wouldn’t have to be as fast going to get ground balls up the middle and then the hole but I’d still have an opportunity to have my hands and arm play. The Orioles liked me better as a catcher than a shortstop.
What was that conversation like when you were getting that feedback? How did you feel?
It was that gasp. It’s like, “That sucks. I’m a good shortstop.” I played shortstop my whole life. That’s how I got drafted. Everyone saw me as the captain of the shortstop like Derek Jeter. The Orioles told me, “We think you’re better at shortstop.” One dream had to die there but for another one to take place. One door had to close but another one opened. I started to see that catching could be fun but it was a completely different transition.
How long did it take for you to up to speed in catching or closing the gap?
They told me on day one of spring training. I showed up to camp. I was in the catchers’ group and was like, “This must be a mistake.” Matt Blood, the Head of Player Development for the Baltimore Orioles, was like, “No. This isn’t a mistake. We want you to do this.” We had a long discussion about it after that. They gave me two months. I had all the spring training and then extended spring training. I had to figure it out during the season. I was like, “We’ll see how this goes.”
It didn’t go that great at first. I muscled through that season in the minors and then came back. I had a full off-season. They brought me down to Sarasota. That’s where the spring training is. I figured it out during that off-season and then had a great year the next year. It was probably an ongoing year and a half to answer your question.
It’s an interesting thing. We take our team and the whole developed model is to put them in comfortable situations. Ben Novello is leading up to our sourcing effort. We’ve had him doing private equity operations. There are many people who have said to me on Twitter, “Why in the world would you do that?” There are two ways to learn a language. You could do Duolingo or immersion, dropping somebody into a new position.
That’s a bold move for baseball. I picture a catcher being a catcher for fifteen years before they get to the majors. It’s hard. Everybody’s at the top level. It’s super interesting. You’ve got a background in highly disciplined athletics. Ostensibly, you’ve been playing balls since you were five. You have a major career pivot over to inorganic entrepreneurship. How did your baseball background shape your approach to doing that?
Pivoting From MLB To Business
I think it was my baseball background. I felt like I saw the top and the best guys in the world. I brushed shoulders with these guys. It’s super impressive to see what some of the best baseball players in the world do like Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Julio Rodríguez. I shared bus seats with them. They’re studs but I saw a human side of it that this is possible. You can achieve these levels of success and anybody can. What that did for me was when I was out of baseball and was looking for my next opportunity and what to do next, I was, “What’s the biggest opportunity? What’s the thing that I can focus on for the next 40 years and continue to grow?”
I hope you take this the right way. I don’t see you pivoting over to a corporate finance director role. It would kill you, wouldn’t it?
Yeah.
With baseball, you’re highly disciplined and structured with lots of responsibilities. Why is that okay but the corporate finance director job is not?
In baseball, believe it or not, you still have to answer to a boss. You have the front office with all the metrics. You got your agent, farm directors, the GM, and everybody that’s pretty much telling you what to do at all times of the day. You can’t control a lot of roster moves. I couldn’t control when I got traded. As soon as I left baseball, I wanted to be in control. In a corporate finance position, I don’t know necessarily if I’ll have that control.
I can assure you that you will not have as much control. You’re out in the world. You said, “I’m going to do something new. I’m going to buy a business.” We get a lot of questions on, “What is it like?” What’s the biggest misconception that you found from what you expected it to be to what it turned out to be?
There are a few things but the first thing is the smaller the deal, the quicker you’re going to have to focus on sales. Immediately, if it’s a bigger company, you can hash out some operations stuff first but the smaller companies are selling every day. That’s how they stay alive. You’re going to have to have marketing skills and sales skills. Buying a business is not passive. A lot of these gurus are pitching that and they don’t know what’s going on with these small businesses.
When I say small businesses, it could be $5 million in revenue and below, even up to $10 million. You still would have to keep your foot on the gas. That’s number one. Number two is even if you have an agreement in place with customers, clients, and stuff, people can not pay if they don’t want to. You got to go out there, collect, and do all that. That’s a full-time position. That’s the birthing point of there’s a lot of fires that take place that you don’t expect that’s taking you away from the main operations of the business.
What’s your best high watermark collection story of somebody who wouldn’t pay? How much did they owe you? How did you get the money or not?
It’s a couple of $10,000 a month retainers that we had to go collect on. They always paid but they always paid a month late and that last month. They’re always a month behind. It’s never like we got to go get the crowbar and beat their front door in. It’s always like we have to do a better job of talking to them and making sure expectations are set on the front end. We do a good job of vetting prospective clients in the sales process. That’s where the relationship begins. If you take bad clients on, you’re going to have bad payers.
If you take bad clients on, you're going to have bad payers. Share on XWhat’s your diligence question to figure out if they’re going to be a bad payer? Have you ever decided not to work with somebody because you were worried they weren’t going to pay?
It’s a body language. It’s like a feel thing. You can also get an idea like, “What’s your current revenue?” They’re like, “Last month, there were $50,000 to $100,000 a month,” or something like that if they’re a small business. I say, “What about last month?” Everyone has their ego in the way of what they do. Last month, they could have said $30,000. We probably wouldn’t take them on as a client. They’re too small.
Digital Marketing Businesses
You’ve got three digital marketing businesses. Are you trying to unify those together? How are you thinking about integrating? What’s the plan?
I don’t have all the answers. I keep them separate. Rise, a website design SEO, is very specialized in those two fields. The SEO or Search Engine Optimization is very good. I wanted this deal. That’s the only thing that I loved about that business, besides the culture and the employees. There’s a bunch of different things. With Rocket Fuel and CCS, there are different components like lead generation and then actual clients that I liked as well. Cross-selling is what I’m thinking of. I’d be a fool not to look at enterprise value eventually.
Aggregate in the might be one brand is helpful. Did you know who Scott Larson is?
The name sounds familiar.
He was on the show. He said, “You want to be the platform, not the tuck-in. Getting those brands harmonized is a good thing.” You’re on this journey. Talk to me about your sourcing. You’ve closed 3 in 12 months. What’s your plan for 2025?
I’ve taken a little bit of a breather from sourcing to more focus on these businesses and putting these systems in place to grow them a little bit further. At one point in time, getting more deals done is the lever to pull for higher leverage on your time. At another point in time, when you get some deals across the line, that lever switches to maximizing what you have. That’s where the next twelve months I’m going to hone in on, especially Rise. Dialing the sales process is where I spend most of my time.
Are you going to spend more time farming and cross-selling or hunting new clients?
I would say both because bringing in more clients is going to open up more opportunities for cross-selling. If I focus on more clients on each of the three, there’s going to be cross-selling that happens naturally.
Bringing in more clients is going to open up more opportunities for cross-selling. Share on XYou consider yourself a hunter, not a farmer.
Yeah.
You’re coming out of baseball. Bo likes to call our team that we pull in from the military, High Potential Amateurs. Some of them have an MBA but it’s probably less than 1/3. Some people come straight out of the SEAL teams and get dropped in. I suspect you didn’t study digital marketing while you were playing ball. How did you get up the curve to learn that?
I was industry agnostic in my initial search. That’s how I uncovered a lot of these deals and relationships that ended up bringing to you, guys. Digital marketing happened after the fact. I said to myself, “Whatever business it is that I get across the line, I’m going to acquire it, get a piece of it at least, and then I’ll learn it.” Beforehand, it seemed like I’d be learning 30 different business models or industries. That seemed like not a high use of my time. It just happened that the first deal was in marketing. I dove deep and disciplined myself to focus on that after that.
You originally got this big funnel across industries. What about digital marketing? You brought us industrial deals. We’re looking at other industrial deals with you. It’s pretty interesting that you’d take a board seat or something. What about digital marketing checkboxes for you? What was on the pros list and the cons list? It’s the cons you could get comfortable with and the risk you could get comfortable with. What excited you about it?
It’s the same thing that excites you about B2B industrial. It’s B2B for one and also you get recurring revenue from it. Those two are very sexy for any investor and acquisitions but at the same time, any business you are going to eventually have to focus on marketing. You have to know that skill. If you’re going to play and be in the private equity space or inorganic entrepreneurship, regardless, you’re going to still need a marketing playbook at some point in time. It fell in my lap that that’s where I started.
Digital Marketing Toolkit
I have a hole in my marketing toolkit. We’re trying lead gen. I spent plenty of money from portfolio assets on marketing and never got anywhere. No good leads from a B2B because I was trying to have somebody go, “How do we find people who are searching for sensors, sort providers, globe valve manufacturers, or limit switches?” It only comes up to McMaster-Carr or Grainger. What’s important for a good marketing business? What is the toolkit for any business? What do you have in the portfolio with your three assets and what you’re going to do? What are you trying to build out from your capabilities?
It depends on the business. The first thing though in any marketing problem you’re solving or any lead generation of any company is you’re trying to figure out your prospective clients. Where are they? Where are they congregating? There’s got to be a place that they’re at. If there’s not, where can you get their information from? If you can scrape a list from any of these databases like ZoomInfo, Apollo, ListKit, or Seamless, that’s awesome.
I love that because then you could run some cold emails or do LinkedIn outreach. Those work well. A lot of people try to do cold emails, LinkedIn, or any cold outreach type of thing. The key isn’t necessarily the pitching of the meeting right away. You want to provide value for us. I call them lead magnets. That’s a marketing term. I didn’t coin that by any means but pitching value to get the meeting. People lack trust. No one’s going to get on a call willy-nilly with someone on LinkedIn that’s asking for time. We have to prove our value first and then there’ll be like, “Let’s get an appointment.”
Pitch value to get the meeting because people lack trust these days. You have to actually prove your value first. Share on XI get a lot of cringy LinkedIn messages. The one thing that turns me off the most is the Calendly invite, where somebody’s asking me for my time and then it says, “Click this link.” How do you get to not being spammy if you send somebody a document? I’m assuming you mean an industry overview or you ship somebody some samples or something like that. How do you add value? What’s the rest of the value?
I like videos and case studies. If I’m coming to you and I say, “Paul, here’s a video of how I found 50 industrial manufacturing deals for another private equity firm. Can I send this over to you,” you’re going to be like, “Yes, go ahead. Please, send this over.” The balance of not being spammy is if I’m saying to you, “I’m going to hand you $5,000. Can I send you $5,000?” If you believe me, you’re going to say, “Yeah.” Let’s change out that monetary value for something equal to that. You’re going to have a lot of conversations.
Scott was talking about that. His pitch was, “I can help you. Here’s some of my thinking on helping you exit your business, preparing it for success with private equity.” You’ve got cold outreach. What are the biggest mistakes of people when they’re running their small business from a marketing perspective?
One, they put it on the back burner. They’ll start it and have a little bit of success. With that success, they go and fulfill all those clients or maybe they think that it’s going to stay that way. Marketing is more of a constantly evolving situation. The market sophistication levels are always adjusting to what they’re being hit with and the saturation levels are as well.
Marketing is a constantly evolving situation because the market sophistication levels are always adjusting to what they're being hit with. Share on XIf I send out one message that works well, and maybe it works well for three months and I don’t try and test and try to beat that message, it’s going to eventually fade and those results are going to fade. You’re going to be scrambling again. They’re riding this roller coaster of their marketing efforts. They’re not consistent. The other one is they’re not scaling up. If you’re not scaling up, your competitor is. If it’s working, you have to add volume.
I’m asking, not telling. Would you say your marketing spend should be continually going up but your costs of customer acquisition should be going down?
It depends. It’s a little more complex than that. We always want to lengthen the LTV of each client and shrink the cost of acquiring that client. With that formula, as long as we balance that out, yes, you scale it up but a lot of people get scared, myself included. When you are making a lot more money and you start to level your game up, you get scared of the expenses, spend more, and continually invest. It’s like, “I’ve never spent $50,000 in a month on ads.” It gets a little scary but you can’t be scared of that.
Let’s call it a full-service digital marketing suite. What are the core capabilities of that company and the company you’re ostensibly trying to grow up into?
I’d break it down into outbound, inbound, and then more organic. Organic goes into inbound but outbound-wise and cold outreach, I would say cold LinkedIn is good. Cold DMs is what they call it. That could be on LinkedIn and any social media platform. Cold email is a good one. Cold calling is dying because there are a lot of gatekeepers.
With cold email, you can do it at scale. I’m running cold email campaigns or we’re sending out hundreds of thousands of emails in a month. That works well because we’re sending emails out to provide value. We get those appointments after that. As long as you have a system in place, no one’s going to be pissed about it. We don’t do much cold calling anymore. That’s pretty much outbound. Inbound is paid ads so paid Meta and Google, which would be a search display. You also have YouTube, which would be Google video ads. You got TikTok ads. It’s all the social media ad platforms pretty much.
B2B is not going to be doing much on TikTok. You also have your organic stuff so that’s where we’re putting out content as a podcast, YouTube, videos, and all kinds of different things. That’s the marketing suite but then SEO or Search Engine Optimization, website design, funnel building, landing pages, and then also content, assets, videos, and graphic design. All that stuff falls into it as well.
Belief Journey: Case Study
Do you have a case study of a client you can walk me through? You can keep it blinded. Walk me through that process of getting them on board with the believer. I’ve had mixed success personally so getting over the belief hump for me has been difficult but I do know I need to put up my toolkit. I’d love to hear how you took somebody up that belief journey.
What is your belief?
My belief was originally is B2B marketing cold outreach was not working for me for my industrial companies. The way that I need to grow sales and take share is to steal sales reps away from competitors and buy their book of business. That works too. It is expensive.
They’re a company in Clearwater. They spray the caps of your favorite vodka. They’re a cool case study because they had that same belief that you have. They’re like, “Why would this work?” Once I reframed it, I showed them in any sales process too. This is where I’ve been spending most of my time. I have sales brain but when you’re trying to close a prospect, you have to look at what they’ve tried in the past. They’ve probably tried something in the past, especially a business owner who’s been in the space for twenty-something years. They had to have tried something.
I call it other solutions pass. What did they try? You dive into that and figure out you did this wrong. You were pitching a meeting and skipped three steps. You reached out to leads and went right to a sales call but you didn’t nurture those leads at all. What we did for them was immediately put in lead magnets and started reaching out to manufacturers. We landed a few fishing lure manufacturers. If you know anything about the company, it makes perfect sense. After that, these industries and niches started to develop as their ideal client profile. They knew who they were as a company. It starts to add volume and they can start to bring that product suite a little bit in and define those offers a little bit better.
You helped them expand. It sounds like they had a very narrow view of where their niche was and it could have been broader.
It was broader. In marketing, if you’re targeting everybody, you’re targeting nobody. They were like, “We can do anything.”
If you're targeting everybody, you're targeting nobody. Share on XThey were too broad to get them.
They’re spraying stuff for famous actresses and stuff for their shows. They’re also putting gold plating on vehicles and stuff. At the same time, they are spraying fishing lures and stuff. I’m like, “Hold on. You guys can do it all but let’s focus on something and make some money first.” That’s what we did.
Five-Year Vision
What’s your five-year vision for marketing rollup? What does it look like?
Maybe it’ll be one brand or maybe it won’t. I have guys that are asking to invest in my next deal, which is very nice. It’s very cool. I’ve been able to generate returns for myself, which is awesome. Once I started talking with you, my mind started to get expanded on these bigger deals. Remember our initial conversation? I was like, “I don’t know how to do these big deals.”
I need to figure out what it is and what’s the missing piece. I was thinking about potentially possibly launching a fund or doing something along those lines so I can start to get some bigger deals under my belt to grow a little bit quicker. Maybe in the next years, that’d be cool, and probably roll up a few more of these puppies, generate some more returns, and keep going.
We will be at the independent sponsors’ conference in October 2024 in Dallas. I’m guessing I’ll probably see you there. It would be a good case study to take to the team. Let’s pivot over a little bit. What was the moment when you were searching? Ostensibly, you are months in when you’re like, “This is not working.” Did you have one of those moments? Talk to me about it. I’d love to hear how you process it.
Overcoming Tough Moments
It’s every time a deal blows up. If you’re searching, you’re not just going to find a deal and close it. If you close the first deal, we all hate you. A ton of deals are going to blow up and you’re going to think that these deals are going to close 100%. I would see myself in the company. I already have the plan. I’d be visualizing that you’d be stoked about it before the deal even closes.
Every time it didn’t, it was like, “This is stupid. This is a waste of time. What am I doing? I’ve been doing this for 7 or 9 nine months.” I’d look at the pipeline and I got another meeting and deal heating up. I get back into it. The thing is you always got to have another deal that’s somewhat close to that next domino. Otherwise, you will be like this.
We have lost way too many on QV and the searchers out there, founder communicating, $3 million in EBITDA. You get out of the hood. It’s $2 million or $1.8 million. That’s a chasm at that level. When I was looking at 30 and 50 at the bigger shop, 1 or 2 this way, nobody cares. It’s so competitive that will double the multiple at the lower rates that you’re paying for the business. Contrary to what we see, nobody’s doing 100% seller financing or 50% earn-out. It’s not happening. The people selling those programs are wild. Nobody is going to do 60% seller financing. If you get a 20% earn-out, you’ve done very well.
I like that. If there is a company that does 100% seller financing, that deal is probably a bad deal for you. You’re going to be paying them for a long time of actual profits if you make it that far. You have to look at it like maybe if you can get one of those deals done, it might not be the best deal.
If something’s making any cash, you’re not going to get it. I wouldn’t certainly.
If they knew it wasn’t making cash, they wouldn’t sell or finance it.
You’ve had the tough moments. You overcome them. What about when you onboarded the asset? In my prior life, onboarding an asset is the most important time in the portfolio. What was something that maybe you missed in diligence or didn’t come out the way you thought it was going to be? I’d love to hear a story about that.
A war story here. When you’re onboarding, you go and meet the team, that initial interaction is so crucial. It is the biggest thing that you can focus on as a new business owner or owning a new equity in a new business. You have to get their buy-in quickly and they have to trust you. They will because of the role dynamics at first but you cannot make a bad decision too quickly. I love what you guys say. You learn how things go in the first few weeks, months, or so. You can then start to optimize. A lot of guys will come in and be like, “We’re changing that. We’re changing the colors and the logo.” It disrupts things and employees start looking for another way out. Initially, we’re going to be on job boards looking for something.
Back to my war story. The lever that I was pulling to get cash in the business was the first cash campaign. That’s what I was calling it. It was to cross-sell the existing customers website design services and digital marketing services. There is a big plethora of these clients for more print and promotional items. I was like, “They’ll be fine. There’s got to be someone in here of these 300 clients that would be interested in a new website.”
When I started looking at the client list, I was like, “Wait a second, these are major organizations.” They already have websites, marketing departments, and marketing dollars spent. The only thing they’re using us for is these print promotional items and events. Maybe we would do some backend website for them but then they would also do project-based creative design. I didn’t look too far in depth into the actual customer list and the relationship that I should have to see that there’s a problem that we could sell them a service. If I did go that granular, I would have been a lot better off.
Would you have killed the deal though then?
No.
It’s because you want to know what you’re getting into.
Either way, getting your first deal across the line gives you a level of clap but also a level of experience. This might be where we differ in use but the most important thing, especially being a younger guy in this space, is skills. I’m focusing on skills first and I know the money’s going to come. I’m only focused on getting that experience as long as you can’t be stupid about it. You have to make some money, otherwise why are we doing it? Skills are more valuable than cash when you’re young.
Skills are more valuable than cash when you're young. Share on XI totally agree with you. In your 20s, you need to learn all the skills so you can get the right role in your 30s, whether that’s in a company. 45 to 60, if you do it right, should be your highest during the years. I’ve seen young professionals grow across the street in New York for $25,000. They said, “I liked my boss.” “What kind of role did you put you in?” “They put me in the best development roles I could possibly have.” They go across the street for $25,000. It makes no sense.
To circle back, the metaphor I use for onboarding an asset is you invited me over to your man cave and we wanted to watch some baseball. You had a big screen here and a couple of easy chairs. If I came down there on day one and I started moving your chairs like, “If we move these over here, you’re going to be equal distance to the bathroom. You’ll closer to the beer and have a better view of the television,” even if that’s true, you’re never going to invite me back to your house.
Unless the asset is distressed, you’re going to take 30 at a minimum but 60 or 90 is better to look around the business, build relationships, get to know everybody, and see how the performance goes naturally. We’re on the same page on that. Have you had to make any tough people decisions since you’ve owned these assets?
Yeah. You have to be able to have hard conversations. The more you avoid them, the more they fester and hurt you. You always want to be looking after your people. You want to be a good leader. If they can find a better opportunity elsewhere, that’s your fault as a leader. If they can, you’re holding them back, and they need to go, it’s the root for them because there’s someone else for this role would be fine. Usually, a tough decision has to happen. There’s an old quote by Dan Kennedy, an old marketer. He says, “If you wake up thinking about somebody within the first twenty minutes of the day and you’re not sleeping with them, you need to fire them.” They’re not doing their job. That’s what he says. Maybe that’s a little too crude but he’s got a point.
You want to be a good leader and if your people can find a better opportunity elsewhere, that's your fault as a leader. Share on XWhat about on the good side? Have you given anybody any incentives because they’re doing such a good job?
Of course.
Walk me through it. You were so pleasantly surprised when you got the keys.
I’m always careful about this because equity is super easy to give away and tough to get back. I always want to try and align interests as best as I can because that’s when you get the best opportunities and the best out of your people. Having people step up in a role when you don’t expect them to be is exciting. You see them grow. I’m not trying to use cliché words but it’s a special moment because you’re impacting their life and that’s fulfilling for you as an entrepreneur facilitating that.
Finance And Accounting
It’s seeing somebody step up into a new role. Our COO, Bo, got a battlefield promotion here. We were adding so much growth at the same time and onboarding so many different situations. He smashed it for us. What’s coming out of baseball? It would be exciting to learn digital marketing. Maybe some people like manufacturing like me. What about the finance side? How did you get up to speed on that? I’ve heard so many times people say, “Do I need to go to business school to buy a company?” I see where the question is formed from but how did you get up to speed on the finance and accounting stuff?
My strategies are a little bit more street-type strategies. I paid a forensic accountant. He’s friends with my dad and I took him out to dinner a few times. He bought the big steak. It cost me $400 per dinner. He walked me through financials on every single deal that I wanted to. He’d say, “This is somewhere where I would look at. This is what I would look at here. This is where they’re going to probably be embezzling something if they were.” He pointed out some spots to look at.
I took that so that was where they could be hiding stuff in due diligence. I went to my accountant and said, “Walk me through this.” I learned from these guys because I said, “I’ll pay you for your time. Teach me this.” I shortcutted it. I’m big on shortcuts but if I go to business school, what is that going to be? Is it $50,000 a year or $60,000 a year? I’ve paid maybe $10,000 for that whole skillset.
When I first showed up in my first venture to private equity, my boss gave me an iPad. I get synced up and it’s got 2,000 pages of investment committee documents. I was leaving McKinsey company and I’m like, “What have I done?” I started to figure out that maybe only about 400 would apply to the industrial sector but I I took out some team members on the debt team and ran my card in the long room in Manhattan right near midtown. “What do you want up?” “Get the app. He’s coming.” I’d print out the documents and hand them to him. It was the same playbook. I went from a bunch of operating roles at a P&L and then consulting. I did outside diligence in consulting and operational diligence. I wasn’t doing financial diligence. We ran the same playbook. That’s hysterical.
That applies to any skill you’re trying to learn. That’s so crucial to think like that because there are no rules.
A business is a team sport. The other thing that I get is, “I’m the best Excel modeler.” As a little bit flip it, nobody’s going to care how fast you ran X lookup or index match when you’re an MD at a big shop or you’ve got your own thing. It’s a useful skill. It can get you in the door somewhere but the people skills and connections that you make are what are going to take you on to the next. What advice would you give to the audience who is looking to get into inorganic entrepreneurship or thinking about it?
Advice To Aspiring Entrepreneurs
I would say joint venture. Do some JVs. Maybe bring some deals to a firm or a shop. I would do that ASAP. Put your ego to the side. Try and figure this out. Do that because you’ll learn so much from them. You will shortcut so much pain, aggravation, and bumping your head in weird places by doing that specific thing alone. Chances are, if you’re starting out, you don’t have the experience to potentially get a deal across the line. You have to learn and acquire those skills. You have to figure out what you need to even be doing.
Even bringing a deal to a private equity firm, that’s where you can shortcut things. It took me twelve months to get a deal across the line. All those times, I was trying to joint venture but a lot of it, my ego is in the way. I was like, “I can do this myself.” It took some time and toll. If I had maybe a more experienced business partner, I probably could have had a couple of those deals across the line.
It’s a bold thing for you to say, “My ego got in the way.” Very few people are capable of admitting that.
I try to grow and spot my ego when I can.
Mine has got me in a bind more than once. Like your cold email outreach, you want to add some value. If you’re new, how do you add the value? You’re bringing somebody an investment. What would you do differently to add some value? Most PE firms are independent sponsors. If you bring them a deal, they’re going to take the call. What could you do to learn and get good at it? It’s like, “I’m not just bringing them a deal but I’m adding value to the investment team.”
I don’t need the finder’s fee or anything. As long as you guys keep me involved and walk me through how you do it, this is your deal. If you guys like it, run with it but show me how to do it. As soon as I knew how to do it, that finder’s fee was minimal compared to the skill of figuring out the pieces that I was missing.
We could do both. That’s why I said we’ll do both.
That’s a tip of the cap to you, guys. It shows what kind of a classy operation you have here. That’s what I say to them. They’re always getting peppered with guys asking for percentages and stuff. Sometimes, it’s too much of a headache. Maybe it’s a fringe deal and a guy’s asking for 5%. It’s like, “That’s stupid. That’s not even going to happen. Good luck.”
I have a call for a distressed asset. The founder owns a manufacturing site. It is an EPA regulating problem. He is arguably a Titan in a commoditized type of industry but he owns this plant. His ego couldn’t get out of the way. The money in the till went away. I offered to help them do a restart plan for a non-control equity stake and was going to throw some money in.
Book Recommendations
He had this firm grip on nothing. He was trying to hit the home run every time instead of getting on base. He was trying to get this honey. He wanted $100 million to do this big expansion project and it couldn’t get past him. That number was killing him. That’s interesting you say that. Here’s the last question I ask everybody. What’s the best book you’ve ever read that’s helped you in business or life, and why?
I don’t know if it helped me with my life but the best book I’ve ever read was The Charm School. It’s a Russian spy in the Cold War. It’s a crazy book. It’s extremely well-written and very dense but it traps you. You get so lost in it. Everybody that I’ve given the book to has said the same thing.
That’s interesting. We don’t get a lot of fiction books. Sometimes, you have to step away from the mess and reflect. Somebody said to me, “I don’t watch TV because it’s a waste of time.” There are three shows I watch every night before I go to bed. I get up at 5:00 AM and work. We work with not everybody but a lot of people. If you feel guilty reading a book, you’re doing life wrong. Ryne, it’s super good to sit down with you. I’m looking forward to a continued relationship. If there’s anything we can do for you ever, please let us know. Where’s the best place for people to find you and get in touch with you? Give us your plug.
Connect With Ryne
Follow me on X @RyneOgren. I push a bunch of posts out there on my updates. I’m starting a YouTube channel. You are going to start to see more inside of my deals and what I’m working on as well. I have Instagram as well, @RyneOgren.
It’s super good to see you. I can give him a personal stamp for working with you. It’s a total class act. If you need to sell your marketing business, give Ryne a call. It’s nice to see you.
Thanks.
Important Links
- Ryne Ogren
- RocketFuel
- Rise Marketing
- Scott Larson – Past episode
- The Charm School
- @RyneOgren – X
- @RyneOgren – Instagram