The Secret Behind Ryan Reynolds' Billion-Dollar Success Story

"Ryan Reynolds is now a billionaire, but it's not from acting. It's from this one thing that he calls fast-vertising," Codie Sanchez, Investor in Boring Businesses and founder of Contrarian Thinking, revealed in a recent Instagram video. Sanchez, who hosts a business newsletter boasting more than 400,000 subscribers, dissected the ingenious business strategy that catapulted Reynolds, a well-known actor, into the ranks of billionaires.

"Fast-vertising," as dubbed by Reynolds, is the art of leveraging what's happening in the news, executing swiftly and creating billion-dollar brands. The backbone of Reynolds' success, however, extends beyond this concept. As Sanchez elucidates, "What he basically does is he bought a digital marketing company and he said, ‘For all the companies that I buy, you're going to take whatever's happening in the news and you're going to immediately create ads surrounding it for my companies.’"

This strategy not only proved astoundingly lucrative for Reynolds' brands, but also underscored the value of swift response to current events in the advertising realm. A shining example of this technique was when the internet was abuzz over an ad featuring a husband gifting his wife a Peloton exercise bike. "Within 48 hours, Ryan's company had tested a script and shot an ad for his company, drafted off this little story that was happening in the news," Sanchez explained.

And indeed, Reynolds has a track record of turning business ventures into gold. He sold Mint Mobile for a staggering $1.35 billion and Aviation Gin for $610 million. Moreover, he turned a $2.5 million soccer club into a $4 million asset through a single documentary. However, according to Sanchez, the secret to Reynolds' success isn't his star power or massive online following.

"The secret to Ryan's success isn't that he has millions of followers online. It's that he took attention and fast execution and put them together to create billion dollar brands, something we could probably all learn from," Sanchez concluded.

This real-world example offers a valuable lesson in capitalizing on current events for advertising purposes and being among "the few who do" rather than "the many who talk." Ryan Reynolds' entrepreneurial journey embodies a unique confluence of attention and rapid execution, demonstrating that business success can sometimes come from the most unexpected sources.