Lessons - How We Rebuilt From Zero | Ilya Fedorovich - Vlog Squad Member

In this lessons episode, explore how entrepreneurs shift from survival driven hustle to scalable, purpose-led growth. Discover why service businesses struggle to scale and product ventures unlock faster expansion. Understand how motivation and brand influence guide smarter market entry and uncover the core frameworks behind building high-quality consumer products. So you made 600 in the first year plus minus how do you scale this out? And as you grew it out, what lessons did you learn about building out a services-based business? Why did you not grow this out to a $50 million, $100 million organization? What was the life cycle of the plumbing business? Yeah, so I stayed my dad and I partnered and we stayed together for, I think, those six years, five or six years. And from the first year to the second year, I think we made like 1.8 or two, and then the third year is like 3 million. And we never really went past that. And the reason is it's very, very difficult to scale a trades business. And the reason is you rely on tradesmen. Unfortunately, as of right now, there's a huge, huge, huge lack of tradesmen. So the number one thing to scale ability in the trades business, again, is tradesmen. When you're on tradesmen, you can't scale because you don't have enough people to provide the service. So that was the reason that we weren't able to scale further. Now if I stayed, obviously I would have figured out a way to do so. I would have raised money and I would have said, okay, we're going to post on every single ad or every single job platform. We're going to go to career fairs. We're going to put fucking hiring now $10,000 bonus. We would have figured it out. That's not the problem. The problem is I was given the opportunity to be able to scale my other businesses that I'm currently in much quicker. So I saw that and I said, okay, this business is scale to where it could be as of right now. It's making good money. I can keep doing that. But the opportunity that I have in hand is going to be able to get a return on my time money return on my time much quicker. So when you started this pulling business, your motivations were literally each and survive and pay rent. But a couple of years later, motivations changed. So when you started to scale these other businesses, what were those businesses, what were your motivations, and maybe those motivations have carried through today. But what motivated you when you started to go into other avenues? So well, my two other avenues right now are Zilla, which is my fitness brand and Dover's Pizza, which we haven't launched yet, but we're launching hopefully this fall. The scalability on those two are different with the product A because a product you don't require tradesmen, right? Skill tradesmen, like I said, tradesmen is like a it's far and few between. So all you have to have here is money product and marketing and people in the warehouse which are much easier to hire than tradesmen. With the pizza business, it's a very scalable concept. For many reasons, number one, we don't have many things on our item. Number two, my friend who's backing it is very well known and has a lot of influence. So I'm able to use that to my benefit, right? But I'm sorry, I don't know if I answered your question or no, it's just like no, no, no, no, you're cool, like I get. So so you have, okay, so you have the pizza business that you're going to launch, you have Zilla, I know you have like a podcast as well, but I meant like what motivates you? Like what gets you excited? So yeah, scalability for sure, but there's like a million in one products that you probably could have taken to market. So when you when you launch Zilla or when you launch, when you launch the pizza business, like what's the conversation about like why are we taking this particular product to market? So when you're sitting down like with for the pizza in particular, you're talking to David, like why pizza? Like why is that something that you actually want to get behind? Because again, you already have the influence, you can have the money, but there's a reason why you choose those products, you choose those services you take to market. Like what, what is a thing that sort of drives you? Because you know this better than anyone. If you don't have that motivation that's going to carry you through your one, your two, your five, your 10, it's going to be very difficult. Like you have to maintain that. So there's something that you had in your head or you were talking about at that table when you first started that sort of pointed you in one direction or the other. And I guess that's what I'm trying to sort of pull out from you. Yeah, I think this is a two part answer. And the first part to the answer with Zila and Dolorix, with Dolorix, we chose pizza specifically and it motivated us because pizza is a very friendly and overall known as being a product that makes people happy, right? And I connect that to David, right? So his videos and his vlogs and whatever he does in his life make people happy. So I think I connect that with him. And then I also connect the fact that we both love pizza. And it's just the very, it's such a generic thing to do that it's like almost perfect. You know what I mean? Like it's not too specific. It's like, okay, pizza anybody can fucking do pizza, but we're going to do it the best. You know, we're going to do the best. And we're also going to connect again, a person that has a huge following so people know about this pizza and this pizza can make them happy. And it sounds cheesy, but that's really what it is. Like whenever someone steps into our restaurant, into our pizza rhea, I want people to walk out happier than they walked in. And I know that we'll achieve that by the product that we've made and by the experience that will provide. There's a dope ass motivation, man. That's good. That's very good. There's not, like, it doesn't have to be like complex and confusing. It's just like what gets people excited, like that's that's perfect. So yeah, on the on the zealot. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry to say on the fitness side. Yes. Yes. So on the fitness side, as weird as it sounds, I love pizza and I love fitness, right? So I was like, fuck it. I'm going to do both. You know, I don't see why not. I love I love taking good supplements. I love taking things that I know are don't contain lead. For example, don't have toxins and then don't have shit. You know, most products do have. And so I decided to do that because I am the number one thing, the number one passionate fitness person out there, like 100%. And so yeah, I was like, I'm going to make my own product. Again, I'm going to make the best I possibly can. And I'm also going to challenge myself because my product is plant based, my proteins plant based. Yeah. Most plant based proteins are not that good. I'm sure you know, and they're not that good because of the grittiness or the texture, the flavor, our combination of all of them. And so I found a luckily of a very, very good manufacturer that can provide me a very good product. And I went with it. I was like, this is the best protein I've tasted on the market, including plant and way. And I truly firmly do believe that. And my motivator for that was getting clean, healthy and tasty protein out to the public, which in turn makes people healthy. When you when you launch these products, we can we can pick Xila for to start. You already have an audience. And I actually think it's really interesting. You probably have a lot of, because you've lived it and you've seen the power of personal brand and social and using that as this huge kick off point for a product. But we can go into that in a second. I just want to understand like the entrepreneurial taking a product off the ground from scratch. That's an at the true product. So and not just like a service or a trade. So when you launch Xila, what are the different things that you have to think about? Are you going like e-commerce? Are you going direct to consumer? Are you going on Amazon? How do you source out the actual manufacturer to make sure they're actually delivering a quality product? Like walk somebody through the process of what you did when you started off Zila. Like you can go into like the really the nitty gritty like the granular because there's a lot of people that are trying to launch different things as side hustles. Like now it's not so difficult to find a manufacturer or to drop ship a product. But I mean to do it successfully is not easy. And I mean you already have to find the quality product. You have to find some sort of marketing engine which you have. But then you have to build the website. You have to maybe figure out distribution into retail. So all these different things are all hurdles. But I mean you're figuring it out. And where is Zila at right now? And how did you figure it out like from the ground up? Yeah so originally I had requested samples from about 10 different plants, 10 for manufacturing plants. I'd taste that all of them. And to be honest I didn't like any of them. So then I got connected with a gentleman named Sean, Sean's my partner currently. And he is a protein specialist. Let's just call him that. I was very lucky to be connected with him. He is the one that handles the recipe formulation, the manufacturing, the packaging, everything. He has connections for all of that. And he was again introduced to me by another friend of mine. And so after I decided that I didn't like any of these other proteins, I went with him. And he currently does his own protein supplement line. But it's a very, very different market that he has versus what I have. So there's no conflict of interest. And for people that are wondering again, like why would he do that? The people that he serves are very different from the people that I serve. So I went with him. We figured okay, we probably shouldn't be focusing on spending marketing dollars at first. Being that I do have a following. My friends have a following and we can utilize that. So that's what we decided to do off the bat. And I think in the next two to three months, we'll be utilizing paid media and moving into Amazon. And the only reason we're doing that is because now we understand what power we have and how much power we have, what the ratio of the power versus power and influence versus how much money we can make. So yeah. Okay, so, okay, so when you, that makes a lot of sense. And you went directly to consumer first. You're going to go into Amazon. Are you going to try and do retail distribution as well? Are you just basically focusing on like all direct to consumer right now? I would love to do retail. The problem with retail is that you obviously sell wholesale to retail. And you know, I'm selling the product that 30% 40% less. So it doesn't really make sense right now. If I had the opportunity to hand for a big box retailer to come in and give me a really good offer on my terms, I would do so. But I just don't have that leverage right now to make a good deal. So when I do have the leverage definitely, I think if I were to, I was going to say, how do you not have the leverage yet? Because like, I feel like if you shop and I'm just just spitballing now, like take the market business ideas, but like if you had like, if you shop this around to retailers and you said, hey, listen, I'm going to put this product in your store and then look at we're going to do this huge marketing push and you're going to be seen by like three million, four million, five million people because you have that immediate exposure. Do you think that would like put negotiating terms in your favor? It would, the problem is I don't have three to four, five million people seeing this. You know, David, again, my partner in Doberich pizza, he helps me, you know, push Zila, I push it myself. I have friends push it, but at the end of the day, the influence is solely based on me and my, my audience is not three, four, five million people. Could it, could it get their own point, you know, based on our, our socials or TikTok and our Instagram? Yeah, but we just don't have, we're really new. We don't have that power quite yet. A person that was able to do that very successfully was Logan Paul in prime. Now, obviously, yeah, he's much bigger than I am. So he can pull that off and I can't. I just, I don't feel confident in doing it. Now, it's not to say that I can't get in retailers. I just don't think that they would take me as seriously right now as they would in a year or two where I come in and I really show some big numbers. And I say, look, we're fucking big. You know what I mean? Like the editing for these are our terms. Yeah. And if I were to do something right now, it would really just be a flex because it's cool to be, you know, in a Walmart or fucking 711 or whatever the case is. I think it's cool to do that, but on the, it doesn't help your bottom line. You know, on the money side, it doesn't really help. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.