Rock Bottom to Rock Star by Ryan Blair

Author:Ryan Blair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-06T11:12:31+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THE WRONG KIND OF SUCCESS

Having started my career in the late ’90s in the tech industry, I got to witness the first dot-com companies rise to prominence, minting many billionaires along the way. Netscape went public, Jeff Bezos raised hundreds of millions of dollars, Microsoft’s stock created a massive multibillion-dollar fortune for Bill Gates. This wasn’t just about raising money through venture capitalists, this was about these rock star tech entrepreneurs obtaining the coveted three-letter acronym: IPO. Initial public offering.

From the second I started my career as an entrepreneur, I dreamed about taking a company public. I wanted to ring the bell on Wall Street as a testament to my success and to cement my entrepreneurial prowess once and for all. The IPO is the biggest thing you can do as an entrepreneur. At least, so I thought.

The first time I actually believed it could happen was during a meeting with Bob Goergen, the CEO of Blyth, in April 2012. Blyth had purchased ViSalus in 2008, and since that time, my company had skyrocketed. We were making $65 million a month in sales, and were on track for $100 million in profit by the end of the year. Bob looked at me and simply said, “We can’t pay you what we owe you. We’ve got to take the company public.

“You, Ryan, are going to become the CEO of a publicly traded company.”

When I walked out of that meeting, I could have jumped ten feet in the air and punched a hole in the ceiling with my head. That’s how ecstatic I was. I tried to assess the situation logically, not emotionally, but from that point forward, from April until August 2012, we completely changed our course—we were going public.

The plan was to make our announcement in August, right after a big company event called Vitality. We went into deep secrecy, because if word got out, it would impact Blyth’s share price; they were already publicly traded. We had to make sure our security was tight and that none of our finances were leaked (there were already hedge funds calling to take me to lunch so they could learn more). We had to button up our compliance and hire attorneys. I shifted my entire focus from running a company to becoming the CEO of a public company. (That was a big mistake.)

When you take a company public, the way your valuation is determined is in comparison to your peers in the marketplace. ViSalus is a health and weight-loss company, so the question was, how did we compare to Weight Watchers or Herbalife? Herbalife, at that time, was trading at a multiple above everyone else. Because it’s one of the few publicly traded companies in our industry, and the most similar to ViSalus, Herbalife became the benchmark to what we’d be valued at, and they were worth just north of a billion dollars. So, not only was I going to IPO a company, I was going to have the word “billion” next to my name (“billion-dollar entrepreneur” sounds sexy, doesn’t it?).

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