REID K. RYAN
“People who possess a positive energy and attitude are by default contagiously optimistic.
This quality can have a significant positive impact on entire organizations and teams.”
Reid K. Ryan
Founder Hardworking Gentlemen.
Investor Ashland Hard Seltzer
Working for the NFL and then working as a sports agent seem two pretty amazing jobs that most people would be only too happy to say is how they make a living. So, what motivates one to step away from that relative safety, security and start a company in a space you have little experience. To then start a second brand in another new space, while investing in real estate and building a new house for his family? Oh, and as if he wasn’t busy enough, he is also part owner in Ashland Hard Seltzer. Some people you meet seem to be constantly innovating and Reid is one of them. I can only imagine where he’ll be in a couple of years.
Jonathan: So, you kind of had an interesting journey through college, right?
Reid: Yeah, so I signed up to college, but ended up just leaving school after my first year and just traveling, surfing for a few years, and moving to Australia because I had a deal with a company (surfing) out there and they said, we’ll put you up, we’ll give you a work visa. But then when the work visa dried up after six months I enrolled in the university out there and I spent like a year in Australia, going to school and surfing. Then I came back here and ended up going to Cal State San Marcos just to crank through. I did three years worth of schoolwork in two years because none of my credits from Australia transferred.
It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to something.
Exactly.
So that’s when you went to the NFL?
So, I go hired as a contractor to overhaul their on-site fan experience. My job was to travel all the stadiums, and this was kind of early on in fantasy football days. The League was losing fans to the couch, because they could watch all the games and track their fantasy teams.
The actual on-site fan experience was hurting, so I led a team to go to all the stadiums three games a week; the Thursday game, the Sunday game and then the Monday night game. I really just audited all the fan experience from the tailgate, to end-game, to post-game. So, a large part of that was leveraging all their sponsorship deals. It was a fun experience. It was grueling, but getting in front of team owners and management was a pretty rad thing to do, and going to all the stadiums and acting like a fan and having all access passes was pretty rad.
What you’re like, 22 or something at the time?
That’s right. So, I did a season there and then got recruited to go join Wasserman, which was super fun because again, I got back into kind of my roots and I was able to leverage a lot of the athlete knowledge I had. So, whenever we’d sign athletes, we would be in charge of really activating around them. I did kind of like an athlete brand strategy hybrid. It meant you get to work with Microsoft, Pepsi and Coca Cola. This is real business.
Pretty amazing second job, but I guess this is where vodka comes along?
Yeah, we’re actually having lunch; myself and a couple colleagues there, and we’re just kind of brainstorming on what other lucrative businesses we could potentially start or get into and both of my colleagues were big vodka drinkers and everybody drinks vodka, even if it’s once a week. I actually had an uncle who started a vodka company. It was craft and really good stuff. However, he’s an idiot and the business wasn’t running that well. So, we flew out to Pennsylvania where he was to see if he can make it for us, so we started our own brand, Boyd and Blair Potato Vodka.
We did that for a few years, and grew from 19 states to 42 states. So, it’s just crazy geographic expansion. Which meant I was on the road like 40 weeks of the year. Just basically getting new distributors up and running. I was single at the time, I was young and very ambitious and it was a fun ride. With the vodka company our biggest success was trying to turn left when everyone is turning right, so rather than find that biggest distributors, you’d find the best high-end boutique wine distributors that were very central and regionally focused to just have the best accounts in each region.
But my uncle and his partner started bickering and fighting over more money again. So luckily, I was able to exit that business and sold everything. However, it was unfortunate because we were growing so rapidly. It could have been a much bigger exit but, the experience and the good times were well worth it.
So NFL, WMG, sell a vodka business, where do you go from there?
We bought a tear-down house at an auction and rebuilt the whole thing. Zero experience, but luckily my father-in-law and dad knew what to do and so Christmas dinner one year we just get the plans on the dinner table and go gung-ho at it. The next day we started the demolition, we turned it into a beautiful house with an Air BnB studio, but just sold it all and are now looking for the next project.
So now we add ‘real estate flipper’ to the resume.
Well, so whilst this happened I got recruited to work for an Australian men’s grooming company, which really helped me fall in love with a new category. After two years though and lots of internal struggles at leadership level I could see there were only one or two other natural men’s grooming brands and the men’s category was just growing so quickly. So I left there to start, what at the time was called, Parker Provisions.
We launched it under Parker Provisions and then got sued three months after we got our land- ed product. A guy in NYC was challenging our trademark, which was already approved. And so this was July. This was the week my wife went into labor with our daughter, and I got the cease and desist. I ignored it. Like, I’ll do this when I get home from the hospital. We got more important things to do. By the time I got out of the hospital he had filed a lawsuit and he was just going to hire litigation until we ran out of money.
We had to abandon that one basically. Had to shut down for the rest of that year, liquidate all that inventory at a loss and then start again under Hardworking Gentlemen. Now we’re at a point where the goals are triple what they were last year. We decided to shut down our retail location and rebrand and repackage everything to make it a more mature brand.
What would be a couple of things you would tell your teenage self ?
So many things. I mean I was a shit-head when I was a teenager. I thought I was the coolest kid around and everything would just fall in my lap. At school I just coasted through it and did as little work as possible. And then, in hindsight, you know, had I actually focused on it then I could have still played sports and had a great childhood, but could have also gone to a better university. So, I would say, learn that work ethic, it’s important.
You know I’m lucky my parents ran a business together and that’s what supported us. It was a small local retail chain. So it’s second nature to constantly be in there and hustling like my dad. I kind of resented it at the time, but it was the best education for me and just learning that work ethic. So, I always had two jobs growing up. I always worked at my parents’ stores, as a lifeguard, worked in a surf shop, I tutored kids. I would do anything I could just to save a little money, whether that’s to go buy an extra surfboard, buy an airline ticket. I learnt that work ethic because my old man was such a frugal bastard. You know, that’s why I was able to buy a house when I was 25 and I’m able to start businesses now and at least have the financial foresight to like, plan ahead.
The other advice is to encourage someone to do what I was fortunate enough to do and get out in the real world, get experience in different jobs and be able to fend for yourself.
The other thing I would say is to do something you’re passionate about. As someone much wiser than I said, “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
People who possess a positive energy and attitude are by default contagiously optimistic. This quality can have a significant positive impact on entire organizations and teams. People will be drawn to you, believe in you and want to work with you. This is particularly important in leadership roles, but also has a large impact on every aspect of your life, happiness, and ultimately success.
Talking of school, it makes me think how scary it will be for our kids’ generation. Things keep going in this trend, making it easier and easier for people to accumulate credit, debt and loans to go to school. That’s something that you don’t learn in school. If I didn’t have my dad, who was like, “here’s your bank account that you set up when you’re 11 years old and here’s your debit card, you’re in charge of balancing that. If your account goes negative, I’m not going to bail you out.” I would have been in so much trouble. I wish kids would learn about the implications of debt.
I’ve been super fortunate to have a winding road career that’s taken me a lot of different directions. I’ve connected with a lot of great people and have luckily been able to invest in different things, whether that’s real estate, beverage brands and even starting my own brand. As long as I’m excited about it and want to jump out of bed and go work for it, I’ll keep doing it. You have to have that passion. That passion in your life will get you through those hard days and lawsuits and various ups and downs.