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Teddy Giard

@teddyg111

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Just a dude building brands with his friends and documenting how we do it (@giard.co). 🦦
📞 Apply To Join The Portfolio👇

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I’m about to take the biggest swing of my life. Publicly.
And I’m documenting every single part of it.

The good. The bad. The ugly. Every framework that helped us own the distribution of our own voice along the way.

Our mission at @giard.co is to build brands that further human potential. Through faith. Through a family-owned and operated holding company. And through the next generation of household brands we’re launching this year.

We’re bringing the founders and CEOs who are or feel like family right along with us.

Here’s our bumper sticker goal: make every one of our employees a millionaire before 30. After that, they’ve got the runway to change the world. Or keep changing it with us.

Big whatever is focused on the bottom line. We’re committed to profitability, prosperity, and a purpose that unites people around something bigger than themselves.
We lead through actions. God does the chasing.

Don’t believe me? I dare you to just watch.

Here’s how we’re sharing all of it: full newsletters on Substack, full episodes dropping on YouTube, and everything we’re learning in real time right here.

Drop your questions below. We’re answering all of it.

If you live for a Rudy story, welcome to the show. 🤝 by @teddyg111

It took me 11 years to understand what we were truly building with @giard.co, and now I’m excited to share that we’re finally ready to invite others to join our portfolio.

But first, here’s how we become a portfolio:

I started with my own brands, became a W2 employee, left to start advising, became a production company, worked as a sort of agency for a while, and eventually found myself in CMO roles. All that to say, I still wasn’t sure what the end goal was.

But one thing stayed consistent the whole way through. I’ve lost more money with bad agencies than I ever lost with bad businesses of my own. Retainers that didn’t perform. Teams that weren’t accountable to results. People spending my budget like it wasn’t their own, because it wasn’t. And for a long time I genuinely couldn’t figure out how to do what we do and take other people with us without becoming the thing that burned me.

I’m happy to say we’ve started to crack the code.

Over the last year we went heads down on our own brands. Unlocked AI workflows, built out reporting systems, cracked ad buying, dialed in media operations, and kept telling what we think are genuinely great stories. And candidly, it worked. So we kept building.

So here’s what we figured out: We’re a holding company. We’ll never stop building our own brands. That is and forever will be the goal. But how do we take the people we care about with us?

We’re adding 5 partners to our portfolio to scale with the exact same systems we’ve built for ourselves over the last decade.

A few weeks ago we quietly opened up 5 spots. 3 filled without saying a word publicly.

Now we’re opening it up.

If you’re done paying people who don’t have to make payroll off the performance of their own ideas, this is for you.

We have two spots left. Applications are open via the link in bios. by @teddyg111

Nobody owes you the life you dream of. 🤯

Society isn’t set up for you to pursue your purpose—until you’re willing to embrace the uncomfortability of finding it.

If starting your own business was easy, everyone would do it. That’s why it’s hard. And that’s what makes it worth it.

No one is going to hold your hand and guide you to the life or career you’ve always dreamed of. You have to figure it out yourself. You have to “create your own luck”—which, in my experience, is just the compounding effect of showing up as a loving, intentional human being.

Here’s the thing: If there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, you have two choices:

1️⃣ You try, and you’ll either succeed or learn some of life’s most valuable lessons.

2️⃣ You don’t, and you’ll probably learn those same lessons—but in a way where you have far less control over the outcome.
At the end of the day, don’t let the bullshit of starting a business stop you from starting in the first place.
Treat it like a game: If you play, you might win or lose. But if you never play, you’ve already lost.

If you have something you’ve always wanted to do in life, you’ll either learn a lot of valuable life lessons, or you’ll always live with the regret of never trying and probably learn those life lessons in another form where you probably have less control of determining the end outcome.

Moral of the story - don’t let the bullshit of starting a business get in the way of you starting it in the first place.

Look at it as a game that if you play, you can win or lose, but if you have the desire to play and never do, you’re just going to lose.

—

If you have a business idea and have no idea where to start, comment it below and I’d love to brainstorm in the comments. 👇🏽

PS - Thanks Ted Phaeton for having me on the podcast! by @teddyg111

We have reached the point in time where we are without question, putting all our money where our mouth is.

📸: @greynot_gray by @teddyg111

Full circle with some of my favorite folks and some incredible projects rolling out in the next few weeks. That’s all.

📸: @greynot_gray by @teddyg111

So good. by @teddyg111

An absolutely unforgettable moment with @laventanadivecenter 🫍 // @angie_dives by @teddyg111

This photo of an orca’s eye has become one of my favorite images I’ve ever taken, mostly because of everything that had to go wrong for it to exist.

Growing up, whenever things felt like they were falling apart, my dad always had the same response: ”The end of the story tells the story.” Looking back, I don’t think there’s a better personal example of what he meant than the day this photo was taken.

Aside from all the technical failures I outline in this post, there was a deeper emotional dilemma I was faced with. One that I think anyone who’s built a career around something they’re passionate about has probably felt.

When I climbed back onto the boat after flooding the camera, everyone was ecstatic about the orcas we’d just experienced. Half of me could relate to them, but the other half was tearing myself apart over everything that had gone wrong and wondering if I’d failed at the very job that brought me there.

Those two feelings existed at the same time. It was one of the strangest emotional battles I’ve ever had, and it made me realize that the same career that gives me access to moments like this also changes the way I experience them.

Even on the best days, part of my attention is on focus, composition, exposure, and making sure I tell the story well enough to do the moment justice. Those things are part of the job, and I genuinely love that challenge. But they also mean I’m no longer just experiencing the moment, I’m responsible for preserving it.

I don’t think it’s unique to filmmaking either. Whether you’re a guide trying to put clients on fish, a pro athlete, a photographer, or someone on the corporate side, I think anyone who’s built a career around the outdoors has probably wrestled with that same balance of expectation. I’m still trying to figure out where that balance is.

But, you know...
The end of the story tells the story. by @teddyg111

Here is what we are building, in the terms that I use to explain it to our own team:

Giard & Co. is a holding company for lifestyle brands across CPG, apparel, and hard goods. We are not an agency. We build and own brands, and we work alongside a small number of partners each year using the same infrastructure we run on our own brands every day.

It works in three tiers.

1. Portfolio
The brands we own. We build the product, the identity, and the vision from scratch and we operate them ourselves. The portfolio is the proof. Everything else exists because we are doing the thing first.

2. Partners
A small number of brands each year that we bring into the portfolio through a retainer and performance based revenue share. We run them end to end on the same system we use internally, paid and organic, content and site. We win when they win, and lose when they lose. This is pretty much the only ethical way I k ow how to run something close to an agency model.

3. Advising
We think the future of marketing is either in house or directly integrated with it. So in advising we help brands build their own in house media department and scale it with AI integration. Same system we run ourselves, we just train their team to operate it. With this new operating system we are also more than often handed the entire media budget. As of today, when we have been handed the budget directly, we have doubled the media output on the same spend and more than doubled performance across paid and organic. That is what we hand over.

Media is the modern currency. If you do not own it, you do not own the distribution of your own voice.

The point underneath all of it is simple. Build brands that help people make a living doing what they love and continue exploring things that further human potential. by @teddyg111

New YouTube Video coming soon documenting how we’re building @giard.co and how I plan to make our employees millionaires before they’re 30.

And on that note it’s probably worth telling everybody we hired 4 full time employees.

And yes we are launching merch and donating all net profits to charity … more on that soon.

And we are also launching more YouTube videos.

Am I missing something? Probably.

Talk soon. by @teddyg111

It’s about that time to post things that lack consequential order and provide no context. Enjoy. by @teddyg111