Ridge Wallet Scaling

Sean Frank shares how he helped grow Ridge Wallet from a small family business to a $200+ million company.

"I ended up taking Ridge over - father-son best friend, they start this business, they get to like $5 million a year in sales. The dad was a special ed teacher, Daniel was gonna go be an accountant, and this thing just caught fire. He really didn't want to be an accountant, so their expectations for the brand when they got to $5 million a year - they're like, 'This is the best thing that's ever happened.'

Me and Connor being young, I'm like, 'I think we can get to $15 million a year, I think we can get this thing to $30 million a year.' I remember telling Connor, 'I think we can do $100 million a year selling this wallet,' and he looks me in the face and says, 'There is no fucking way in hell we're gonna do that.' This was like 2017.

They didn't really want to run it all that much anymore - they didn't want to manage people. So I'm like, 'Cool, we'll do everything else.' My agency gets built around running Ridge Wallet. We do their customer service, product importation, all their marketing, web dev, and I'm charging them like $200,000 a month. All the money is coming from Ridge Wallet - they end up being like 60% of all agency billables for my tiny agency.

At a certain point, they're like, 'Hey, we should just merge.' So me and Connor take an equity stake, everyone in my agency just goes in-house to Ridge. I ended up selling off the agency to one of the people who was running it, and that was probably 2018. Since then, Ridge has gone from $30 million a year to over $200 million."