The Andy Frisella Story: Creating a Fitness, Nutrition and Podcast Empire from Nothing

When Andy Frisella started out, he and his business partner rented a retail space with the last of their money, then shortly after they were robbed and their merchandise was vandalized. Most people would have just given up, but not Andy.

Over 17 years ago, on their first day in business Andy Frisella’s company brought in $7. On their second day they brought in nothing. It took them 8 months to have a day of sales over $200. 7 years after that he was only bringing home $695 total in a month. 10 years into business his perseverance and dedication was earning him and his business partner $45,000 per year each. They defined “humble beginnings.”

Fast forward to today and his companies, Supplement Superstores, 1st Phorm International, Paradise Distribution and others enjoy sales in excess of $100 million a year.

If you are curious how he made this incredible leap, and what kind of mindset it took to persevere to get to that $100-million mark, then you are definitely going to want to see this interview I did with Andy.

Just in case you didn’t think this was impressive enough, Andy also built one of the world’s most successful business podcasts called The MFCEO Project Podcast. He has a die-hard community of over a million listeners per month, and has interviewed some incredible guests such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Lewis Howes, Dan Fleyshman and other masters of business, fitness and more.

Here’s what I learned from Andy:

You have to own what you want to do, and know what you don’t want to do.

Andy did not want to do construction, that was obvious when talking to him. From the beginning he was dead set on making sure that he could lead the life that he wanted. Nothing was going to stop him, hence the 17+ years of hard and smart work to get to this point.

“It was either learn how to do this, or go be a grunt for my entire life, and the thing is I didn’t want to do that. My family comes from construction. I admire people that do that. I’m not trying to talk down on that; it’s just something I didn’t want to do,” Andy said.

In Andy’s case, he put his back against the wall and got in the fight.

“The truth of it is, man, we just didn’t have a choice. We had to stick with it. We had to do what we needed to do to survive. We didn’t have a backup plan,” Andy said.

By not having that backup plan, and by not giving himself too many contradictory options, he was able to focus and make it happen. This was his only option, and that put him in survival mode to make it work.

I think what others can take away from this is that there’s power in putting yourself intentionally into that situation. Daymond John also agrees and even named his book after it, The Power of Broke.

If you are already moderately successful, I think there is power in replicating this mindset for all of your new ventures. Comfort and contentment can be the death of an entrepreneur. But if you find a way to make yourself hungry again—or for the first time—that’s when the magic happens.

Andy said, “I think people give themselves too many options, too many outs, and too many other backup plans to the point where things start to get a little tough, they go off the schedule, and they go off the plan and just revert to this backup plan, and they end up in this situation where they’re always on another backup plan and never really following through with their priorities of business.”

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve personally made on my journey to becoming an Inc. 500 entrepreneur and building successful businesses, was having my hands in way too many things and having tons of backup plans in place. I learned after a while to drop all the backup plans and focus in on what I was doing like my life depended on it. Even though I was fortunate to never be broke or have a dire emergency situation to get out of, the mindset is something that you can totally learn.

Success is about fulfilling potential.

Andy said, “Just like our coaches told us in high school, you know, ‘If you leave it all on the field, you can’t have any regrets.’ And, I think, at the end of the day, that’s our goal, right? Our goal is to live a life that we’re not regretful of.”

But, on the flip side of that, comfort is the death of an entrepreneur. If you are too comfortable, and are not acting on your dreams and goals, then you may not leave it all on the field. You may get to the end of the track, and have massive regrets.

Regardless of the outcome, I think almost everyone would agree that it would be best to be able to look back and know that you did everything you possibly could, and chances are, if you truly do that, the universe has a magical way of rewarding you.

This was just the tip of the Iceberg with Andy and I encourage you to watch the full interview to see how he built his $100 million dollar a year empire and massively successful podcast and personal brand: 

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