Sean Whalen
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I grew up Catholic. And so it was kind of a recent convert to the church. And I just started realizing that people love to connect. People love to talk. And I was really good at it. I was good at just talking to people. And I know that sounds really weird, but like there really is an art form to communication. There's an art form of being able to not just talk. So, Hey, how's your water?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Like, why do you like that water? Okay, great. You know, whatever, but like really fucking,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
listening to people and hearing them and knowing what's driving them and something that i've always been fascinated about and with is is what's behind it you know this is why headlines and i'm not like bouncing around like every other freaking bozo or like oh my god oh my god i'm like you know what's talking about a second i like to critically think
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And for me, being able to be in a place where I can ask deeper questions, it's fun for me. And I found on my mission is I was talking about God. I mean, God's such a crazy topic for so many people because you have people that are way over here and the people are way over here. People have no clue.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And so it kind of forced me to really, number one, find my foundation, like what I really believed and how I really believed. felt about life and who I was and purpose and the entire thing. But I found out like people just love to connect. And so it's just become almost a skill set, an art form that I've just gotten better and better and better at is communicating with human beings.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
But, um, you know, it definitely doesn't come from my youth. I mean, I was a quiet freaking kid, man.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I mean, that's talking. I mean, when you, when you really give a shit about people, like when you really care, like, I think it's, it's something that, I mean, we're not, we're, we're just so busy trying to get, believe me, hear me, this is me. And it's like, I really, it sounds funny, but if it can't be explained on a whiteboard or like with crayons, it's too complicated.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
We should not have a tax policy in America that can't be explained on a fucking whiteboard, right? We should not have foreign policies that take 30,000 page freaking manuals to fucking explain, right? No one's interested in that, really. And so we tie this into the marketing and the business and the whole thing. Like copy is really important. You know what I mean? What are you telling me?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Everybody knows they're being sold something. So we've already got that out of the way, but what are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate with me? Yay, yay, nay, nay. If the answer is a simple no, then just fucking say no, right? But I love being able to look at complex things and I break it down in my brain to just like coloring book kind of conversations.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Like, yeah, this is what this really is. And it's just more, to me, it's more fun that way. I have more connection to stuff that way. You know what I mean? Well, absolutely. And so let's talk about lions, not sheep.com.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Can you talk about some of that? Yeah, for sure. First of all... there's two philosophies in my opinion, like you, anybody who's a really, really, really good ad guy or copy guy or whatever. I mean, you can take any product and figure out a way to sell it. Right. And there's a lot of people that do that. They take, you know, products from China. They're really good.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
They figured out the game, the algorithms, they can do that. And then there's people that, that, have passion behind something. They live it, they breathe it, they sleep in it. It's, it's, it's being to them because their kid has cancer and they want this product out there and they want this thing or that thing. And there's a story and a connection behind it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And either, either one of those is phenomenal. Right. But I think the people that struggle the most are the ones that they, they, feel like they have that passion and they feel like everybody's supposed to have that passion. I had to, this shirt is so bad-ass and the saying, everybody's going to buy the saying and this entire thing. But like, I've found for me that I embodied lions, not sheep.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
It literally was for me. You know what I mean? Like when I wrote my book, which is sold over half a million copies, completely organically. I mean, I didn't even put page numbers in there. We forgot it. It was so basic and just put out there in the marketplace. I wrote a book that I wanted to read. like that I would want to read. And I think a lot of people need to realize like,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
what do you want to wear? Right. It's easy to come up with slick marketing and slick products and whatever, whatever. But if there's no marketplace for it, it doesn't fucking matter how great your landing pages are, this, that, the other. So you're trying to tie in that story, you know, like who, why is this relevant to you? Like, why do you believe in this?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And then I've literally for the last couple of years, I've been talking about lines on sheep and it's become me. And people have watched my journey as a father, as a business owner, as a man, as, as, as a divorced guy, as a dating guy, like all of these things have been really transparent. And I think people vibe with that. They resonate with it. Right. And so for me, lion's not a sheep. It,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
everybody's been telling me, dude, you're in the perfect storm now with the whole political climate and Trump, because it's like, we're all, you're one or the other, right? You're picking, I do the lion or you're the sheep, which is great, you know, but yeah, there's 175 million people on your side. We're right down the millions. Here's what's cool is everybody now wants to jump on that, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And we ought to plug into that emotion. They want to plug into the political climate, whatever, whatever. And you really don't have a track record. You don't have a tribe. You don't have any of that. I didn't set out to do that. And I think that's what really makes Lions on a Sheet unique. And I think a lot of people need to wrap their head around this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And it's really difficult to do is having the consistency of delivering content and messaging for the long game. Because now we're in a perfect fucking storm. Now we're crushing because so much content has been put out there over the last couple of years. And it wasn't with the objective of selling t-shirts or selling hats or selling any of that shit.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
My mom, literally, she retired last year and she was bored as shit. I said, mom, come help me make t-shirts. And so we had one heat transfer. She was in the office and we'd sell 20 shirts a month, just people stumbling on the website. And she'd run down, she'd get the shirts and she'd make them and she'd write a little note, package them all out.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And that was really what the apparel brand was until the beginning of this year. But being able to sit... in a story and deliver that to people that they believe without trying to sell them anything is massive. And that's a huge tactic that I don't think very many people understand is I believe that the very best salespeople on planet earth are never selling anything.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Like you go to my Instagram or my Facebook, you will never see me selling anything. Yet I'm literally able to make millions of dollars through coaching and consulting and other companies that I have but I'm not selling anything. So how does that work? It's unlimited. I'm breathing it. I'm exuding it. Right. And that's, you know, if you're a Jeep guy, you want to start a brand around Jeeps, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
If you're driving a fucking Honda Accord, good luck, right? You better know the clicks and the algorithms, but it's like some of those dudes are like hardcore Jeep guys. They get it. They know what Jeep guys talk about. They know what Jeep guys want and they're able to exude that message. Right. And, and people instantly resonate with it. So that's,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I really do believe that you're in a day and age where we're completely bombarded and flooded with products and things and ads and messages. And if you want the short game, you better freaking figure out how to become a really good marketer, a really good copywriter and buy ads better than anybody else.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
But if you want to build a real brand, like something that has legs that will be around for a long fucking time, that resonate with people, like, why is it important to you? And you better be fucking living it. If you're living it and talking about it, everybody's like, do I, my personal page, am I this page? I got it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I don't even know how many hundreds of thousands of followers on my personal page. I have way less than my business page because I just, I'm always living this, talking about it, breathing it, eating it. And you'd be surprised how many people could plug into that.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And now that we're turning on ads and running ads and doing shit like that, where I have almost a billion views on my videos, I can now target some of those videos and, you know what I'm saying? So, but I've been playing the long game and consistently doing the content, consistently talking about it. People just know like, Some people will see the shirts.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I get messages where they're like, dude, that's the bearded guy. Like, that's the bearded guy. They don't know my name because they recognize my video or a post. They're like, I know that guy. That's his thing, right? And it's really cool.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Where are you going? Right now, we're trying to put the wheels back on the bus. We got our asses kicked in production. We grew so fast. I turned everything on back in March. What I mean by that is I hired a team to come in and start running ads. I'd never run an ad before. I'd never put ads out there. We went from that to We were doing $2,000 to $3,000 a month of just apparel sales.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
We did $463,000 last month of apparel sales in basically 90 days. A lot of damn t-shirts. And it fucked some things up. And I learned some very valuable, expensive lessons on production and being able to keep up. And it's kind of a funny story. I mean, everybody thinks it's just sunshine and roses, but all my kids and their friends worked for me and they were all part of our production team.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And so we were doing heat transfers and the whole thing. And I'd run all the numbers and I've got all the production companies and all the big promotional companies. They were hitting me up. Let us do your shit. Let us do your shit. Long story short, we had 10 of them employed as we were just crushing. We went from literally like
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
picking up one box of shirts and screen prints to get pallets delivered. One of the kids apparently got COVID and because they're all like my daughter's friends, nine out of the 10 kids, their parents made them quit. Their parents made them literally self quarantine. And so we were doing 350 orders a day, which represents about six to 700 shirts. And so we were like, oh, no problem.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
Get a temp agency and bring all these people. Well, they fucking takes forever for them to learn and speed. And well, they, anyways, we got, we got really far behind. We got about 6,000 shirts behind. Wow. And team came in and they're like, bro, we got a problem.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
and i'm over here like go go go let's go let's go and they're like hang on bro we got a fucking problem because even if we work 24 hours a day we can't get the numbers that we needed so if that wheel on the bike isn't working you can't yeah because i've got some guys some dear friends of mine they're big in the e-com space they do millions of dollars a month and i've told them this and they all laugh and chuckle because they're like yeah dude like
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
You know what I'm saying? Like every single person has this happen to them.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
When I talk to entrepreneurs and business owners and people, I'm like, dude, you're a better father when you feel better. You're a better mother when you feel better. You're a better everything when you feel better. Lying doesn't feel good. Lying is scary. It's do they know? Do they know? Do they know? Where you just fucking tell the truth and you got nothing to worry about.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
So it's like, if this is the recipe for me connecting with people and me feeling better, then I'm just going to keep doing it. And at the time, five years ago, and not that I was the only guy sharing shit on social media, but very few people are talking about real raw shit. You know, it's just airy fairy political things, reshares of this.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And so I just went on a mission, like I'm going to share me. And I, since then I've literally have almost a billion views on my videos, millions of followers. I mean, literally hundreds of millions of engagements on my posts from Instagram to Facebook. I mean, some of my videos have reached 150, 160, 170 million views of one video and, which is just mind bending to me, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
But that's what I found is my own little kind of recipe. And I felt better. The marketplace resonated with it and I just kept fucking running it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
I don't know. Nobody's ever asked you that. Thinking back on life, my parents split up when I was an early teenager. I was actually a really quiet kid. I was really reserved. I was a chubby little kid. I was a pretty good baseball player, but I wasn't popular. I wasn't the class valedictorian. I was really, really quiet, really reserved.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Priceless Advice for Being an Entrepreneur
And I think for me, when looking back at it, when I went on a Mormon mission, I went on a two-year Mormon mission, that was where I really started to kind of find my voice. I mean, you're out basically selling God. We were going door to door. pitching God to people. And it was something I was really passionate about. It was something that like, I didn't grow up in the Mormon church.