Ryan Blair - Impact-Driven Entrepreneur & Best-Selling Author | Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain

Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot has been a huge supporter of the show. They have so many tools that can help your business. The one that I want to just mention today, so you go check it out, is their new AI chatbot. It's called campaign assistant. HubSpot's campaign assistant is a game changer for creating marketing campaigns at scale. It turns your key selling points into a cohesive pitch, which helps you deliver knockout emails, ads and landing pages in minutes. Just choose your content type, input a few keywords, key points, pick a tone like friendly or witty, and let the AI robots handle the rest. You can copy and paste the content to whatever channel you'd like or even convert it directly into publishable campaigns without leaving your HubSpot interface. So let campaign assistant take care of the campaigns so you can get back to growing your business, work smarter, not harder, at HubSpot.com slash campaign-assistant. Where did I come from? I had an interesting upbringing that I got to see all three income classes by an early age. My dad was a really smart engineer, a very brilliant guy, read a lot of books, really intelligent, but he had a lot of trauma in his life and he never healed from. As a result of that, he got addicted to drugs and my middle class environment was ripped away from me and I was about 13 years old. I got caught up in gangs, I would do anything to basically survive on the streets and my mom and I were relegated to a environment of poverty. And that was from about 13 to 17, when it's 17 years old, my mom started dating a man who was an entrepreneur and he took an interest in her and so he had no choice but to take an interest in me. And as a result of that, I got a mentor in my life for the very first time and he taught me about entrepreneurship and I made a decision that I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I was terrible at school. I dropped out of high school, I went to community or a continuation high school and then from there I went to a community college and just I never looked back, I made the decision to be an entrepreneur. I did have a job as an executive for a brief period of time in the computer sciences field and that was what got me involved in technology and got me involved in looking at companies, you know, with a technological perspective and I've applied that perspective to every venture I've been a part of sense. And and how was how was so how was jumping into entrepreneurship at a very young age, how like this, this mentor relationship, what did you, what did you learn at a young age, what made you want to go into it because I would almost argue that most people that saw entrepreneurship from a young age would stay the hell away from it because of the hours of time, the energy, the effort, but you like dovehead first into it with everything you've done since then. Yeah, you know, at first it was the money because I saw him making millions of dollars, he would was in the foreclosure business, we'd buy foreclosures and you'd have cashiers checks on, you know, for $500,000 at all times and it was a joke that he'd have 500,000 cash on me because, you know, you want to be able to pick over foreclosure in a moment's notice and I, you know, I raised on the streets, I never saw people with 500,000 in cash on them, right, that was like a whole nother level. So at first, I was, I got involved in it because it was a money and to me, you know, the way my mind work was simplest, I couldn't be a doctor and I couldn't be a lawyer, but I could become the person that wrote the checks to the doctors and the lawyers. And so I thought it was silly that in school they never taught you, you know, there's three career paths here, not just two, get good grades and be a doctor and be a lawyer, it's like there's a third one that is get bad grades and become the person that employs the doctors and the lawyers. So you, you have a three career paths, three career paths, right, and they don't teach one of them. Yeah, well, and you know, they, we just, they don't teach entrepreneurship in school and I had every teacher tell me that I wasn't smart enough that I, you know, she get involved in some sort of a trade, which to me, you know, didn't seem like a desirable path, you know, I tried roofing one summer and I was miserable, you know, in Southern California, it gets really hot during the summer. And so I was up on top of roofs at 110 degree heat, doing manual labor. I worked in a wood shop for a period of time. I did all I worked in a dry cleaner and I was like, this sucks. And so being an entrepreneur seemed to be much better than those environments. So what was the first thing that you dove into? My first company was called 24 7 tech and the idea was simple. You know, we, you know, at that time, computers were failing constantly. You had this thing called the blue screen of death, where you'd be, you know, working on something and that would just crash. Nothing saved. Computers were really a tormenting experience in the mid to late 90s. We had Y2K and other things going on at that time that, you know, that made computing a very difficult challenge for most people. And so my business would basically send a network repair technician to your location. And then we had value add services that we provided. It was called 24 7 tech and our byline was if your networks are wreck called 24 7 tech. And I remember I got an 800 number 888 887 724 7 tech and people could call 24 hours a day 7 days a week. And they basically, you know, I had my, my phone set to ring and I'd wake up and answer the call. And at first, it was me doing that repair and then eventually I scaled the organization. Amazing. And and what it's, you know, jumping into this. This was your first sort of venture, but it was successful. So how did you, how did you hit the ground running and be successful because that's also a rarity, right? And entrepreneurship. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily describe it so much as successful. I built a $2 million business. I put $30,000 into it, which was all credit card. So I took out a bunch of student loans at the time I went to more park community college and then I ended up transferring to a four year called Calvaryton University. And so I started this company while I was in school. I leveraged college college loans, credit cards and any other device I could to start it. And you know, I lost some money on it. I ended up selling my interest to a partner. I wasn't the CEO of it. I took on it was my idea. I ran the entire thing, but I had someone else be the CEO because I was told I wasn't ready for that. And I had some insecurities around my age. I was only 19 or 20 at the time. And, you know, I was uncomfortable with having someone else as a CEO when I was doing all the work. So I actually went to go raise venture capital in the person that I had that was the CEO, didn't, he and I did not see eye to eye and creating a scalable business that that adventure capital. And I was mesmerized by the dot com, you know, the first dot com wave, the net scapes and all of these companies going IPO. I wanted a venture funded technology company. And I wanted to one day, you know, go IPO myself. So he and I didn't see eye to eye and eventually capitalists told me that my business idea wasn't scalable. And I remember that crushed me because I didn't know what that meant. I thought I could scale anything because I had, you know, tremendous amount of belief in myself. And I after I talked to my colleague or my co-founder, I decided to part ways and pursue a scalable path from that point forward. And then what was okay. So then and do you do you agree with that assessment? Like it's hindsight, hindsight is 100% correct. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a labor intensive business. And I was a 19 year old kid that what I wasn't like the leader of all leaders and the ability to come in and lead labor, right? By any means at that time. I still had a lot, you know, I'm still developing myself as a leader to this day. So, you know, no shape of form was I ready to read the masses at that time. Like I thought I was. Yeah, I guess when you're young, you always feel like you know, you can conquer the world. But unfortunately, many people are very humbled when they really try and build something. It's not easy. So, okay, so what did you what did you go into? What'd you go into next? Because I know that you've like you've done, you've done several things over your career. So we can we can stick to the the largest ones. So the next one was a company called Skype pipeline. And that was a and I at that time broadband wireless wasn't ubiquitous as of yet. So a lot of people had challenges getting high speed internet connections. And I acquired a company for $15,000 out of Santa Barbara. And I started building a wireless infrastructure. And we were one of the early pioneers and broadband wireless infrastructure and built a network. Starting in Santa Barbara, but then eventually we scaled the network all over the state of California and ended up exiting that company in a $25 million transaction to a publicly traded company called COVID. How did you how did you find a sorry, how do you find the company for $15,000? Yeah, where did you find that? Well, there was a ISP that was purchasing another ISP and a hobby project of that ISP was this wireless thing that pretty much sucked and didn't work. It was acquiring a sold me this, you know, it was like four or five customers. There was a T1 line and like an access point. And they wanted to, you know, they wanted the, you know, the high end subscribers, the T1 and DSL. And so they basically let me take over this piece of it that was a hobby of the founder of the ISP being acquired. So I grabbed the founder of the ISP being acquired. It was a very engineering center of individual. I heard his vision out. I put $15,000 of cash in and then over time. Well, shortly there I raised about $3 million. By basically just meeting anybody I possibly could and telling him I had a scalable, scalable venture funded idea, venture fundable idea and ended up the terminology from the first time you got shut down. And well, and you know what happened. It was one day I was at Skype line and it was late at night. And that's why I believe in faith. I was late at night. I was working. It was just me in an installer at the time. The phone rang and it was a guy inquiring about internet service for his ranch in the San Nino's Valley, which is very high and area. And I asked him, you know, whose ranch was it? It was a technician and he says, well, it's for an individual is a very prominent venture capitalist. And I said, I won't bring him the service because I don't have coverage in the area. But if he meets me, maybe I will. And so I basically twisted this guy's arm into a meeting with me. And when I did at the end of the meeting, he said he'd invest in the company and he offered me a million dollars at the end of a lunch. And then from there, I started expanding. Amazing, man. Okay. So then so that was your first success, like truly successful exit. Like that. That's considerable. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, it was, you know, it was, I didn't make as much money as a venture capitalist did. I learned when people talk about success. It was an extreme success because I learned a lot, you know, in that venture. And, and I applied that learning to my next endeavors and my next endeavors. And, and you know, and there's been success in every single piece of everything that I've done because I've just learned a ton from each experience. No, I think that's kind of the, that's the main lesson in it. Even if it doesn't go as well as you'd like, like you're not making as much money as a VC. Okay, that sucks. But yeah, like those lessons compound over time, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's the approach that I have to business is that, you know, we're going to, we're going to experiment and learn and experiment and learn and my business career over the past 25 years. It's just been a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning. And I've come out, you know, net positive in terms of the capital that I've been able to retain through the process. And I'm continuing to deploy that capital into new experiments. And I'll continue to do so in perpetuity or for as long as I live. Good, good. So after that, I guess what other, what other, so you, that was your tech exit kind of tech. It was like, it was like a telco exit, but still that was a pretty close to tech. What comes next? I started a software business. Well, it was a social networking enterprise called path connect. And at that time, there was no monetization for that, but the idea was, you know, I would, I would connect people's paths that had goals with mentors. So if you said a goal, I'd connect you to a mentor. I invested a significant sum into that. Basically, all the money that I made by the exit of sky pipeline, either blue or invested into this next venture. And I had no path of monetization. And I ended up rolling that business into my acquisition of Vysalis. Because what I brought to the table with the partners of Vysalis was a technology background. A vision for how network marketing and direct selling would change. And, and then they brought some core experience in the direct selling network marketing space. And so together, we combined forces and that became the, the Vysalis venture, which was the most successful venture that I've been a part of. And, and, and going into Vysalis, give me a, give me an idea of the landscape. So how, how did you enter? Why did you enter? Why did you choose to go down that route? What was your general feel of the company? Where did you want to take it? Because that's also very different than all your previous ventures to like totally, like I believe 180, totally, totally pivoted from text, definitely. So where was your head at? Yeah, there's a couple of things that were interesting to me is one in technology for me to acquire a hundred dollar a month customer and broadband wireless. I deploy a lot of capital and build a lot of infrastructure. In the nutritional supplementation space, I didn't have to deploy really any capital. I just had to have inventory to be able to provide for that capital. So like, whereas in broadband, I might be, you know, 15 months plus on return on investment. And nutrition, I was actually positive because they gave me the money first and then I shipped them inventory. So I like the economics of the space. And I did see a lot of analogies between the two. And I also saw a space that was right for innovation. And I thought that bringing my technology background in my understanding of building infrastructure to a very legacy driven. industry, 168 billion dollar industry that had no innovation at all at the time that I entered into it and was trailing behind any other sector. So I thought maybe this could be an industry that I disrupt. That was my the primary reason why I got involved in it was purely out of the desire to disrupt it through technology. The other thing is I, one of my investors at Sky Pipeline had a company in this space. They were very prominent family that had done billions of dollars in transaction private equity background. And they had acquired a candle company that had a direct selling engine and they had something like 50,000 salespeople. And it's Sky Pipeline. I struggled to get five salespeople. And I thought to myself, like, how could I create a scalable model that had 50,000 salespeople like to me. That sounded very exciting. And so I ventured into the direct selling space to try to understand how to scale a sales model. And that was, you know, my primary objective disrupt the existing, you know, businesses within it through technology and and learn about scaling. And those were the two real objectives that I entered into it within. I liked the product much like I like the Sky Pipeline products. I liked the visell's product when I entered and I liked the original doctor behind the product. And I thought there was some innovation within that doctor that I could unlock and bring to market much like the innovation that I unlocked at Sky Pipeline. So a lot of analogies. I didn't see it as totally different. No, I was going to say, I was going to say, and help me understand the business model for visellas. So help me understand, like, when you say direct selling model, how does that differ from like a CPG company or a direct consumer company now where they're going online or they're going to retail. Like, what does that direct selling model look like? And I guess I, because I recognize that direct selling model from like an enterprise B to B space, because that's you're all you're going pure outbound. But this is a consumer product at its core. So how did that work? Well, you're recruiting affiliates basically. So the way to describe it being affiliate model. And you're recruiting affiliates to basically sell that product. And our unique innovation was our marketing was a challenge. And now you'll see on the internet everyone has challenges. And we brought challenges to social media. So we launched a thing called the body by by 90 day challenge. When you joined the body by by 90 day challenge, you were encouraged to bring three friends with you. And when you brought those three friends with you, we gave you your product is free. We built into our economic model incentive structure for, you know, well, in our cost model, we built in the structure where we could bear that burden where the more people that brought in three people, the more free product we were shipping. And at one point, we're shipping out, you know, tens of thousands of free kits, free product kits per month as a result of that marketing initiative. On the other end of that, we had an incentive structure compensation plan that compensated our sellers based on them helping more people receive their product for free. And the more that they did that, the more we unlocked additional incentives, we had a BMW program that we put 18,000 BMWs into our seller's hands through the BMW program. We had a million dollar cash bonuses if they did enough of the activity that we just described. And so we built a very complicated multifaceted multi variable compensation plan. And that was one of the big primary reasons for the fact that we were able to, you know, grow and scale, you know, to the size that we did. So walking through numbers too. So when you joined, where was it at versus because you won awards, I think for turning this company around, no, at some point. So it went through when I bought it, it was doing about 20,000 a month themselves. And then I scaled it to, and I do have to say I had a fantastic team. It wasn't just me. I hate even the fact that I say I, because it was a week, you know, I had great investors, great business partners, great founding team members. And I was, my primary role was handling the finance, raising the funds, providing the strategic direction and organizing, you know, the operation, the team. But there was some great contributors along the way. But, you know, for the sake of, of explaining how it went. About it, 25,000 built and scaled it. And this was in 2005. And then built and scaled it to the summer of 2008 where I sold it to a publicly traded company called Blythe, which was on the NYC. I was doing about 25 million a year at the time, a couple million a month in sales when I sold it immediately upon the signing of the deal, the great recession hit. I sold it on 8 4 2008. And by September of 2008, the great recession hits, the company basically goes into severe debt. I went from 2.5 million a month roughly down to 600,000 a month. I had accumulated a ton of debt to try to stay afloat. The business was burning cash to the tune of like $600,000 a month. Business was burning 600,000 a month. We were down to about our last 600,000. The public company that bought us wrote us down to zero. And so the gains that I was able to take off the table as a result of their acquisition, because it was a multi-year earnout that was structured as part of the acquisition. I had to put back into salvage the deal, which myself and my co-founders and one of my other investors did, and we kept the deal alive. We re-engineered the company, came up with the challenge idea that I had mentioned. And then from there, I scaled it in a new economic environment, post recession, where we were able to take a lot of market share, and we were able to. While our competitors were retracting, we cut our losses, re-engineered our compensation plan, re-engineered our product offering, re-engineered everything, and we were able to expand while everyone else was retracting. And we took the number one share in shake during that time. We got to a 23% market share, and we were number one over Costco, GMC, and everyone during that time based on the innovations that I've described. That's amazing. Now, I know that there's been like, as you built this up, obviously, the business model was successful. But you got a lot of pushback. There's a lot of shit about this business model that didn't vibe with people. Obviously, it's come up again and again. So what went right? What didn't go right? Why was there so much press around how you grew the company? Why was this something that, I guess, it seems like there's a lot of companies that do direct selling models. Various companies do affiliate, multi-level setups. But in particular, you were covered by tons of news outlets. There was some legal issues that came up from this as well. So I'm curious as to why this all came to be. One, I could tell you I made a lot of mistakes by all means. I was hyper competitive, and I got into a lot of competitive oriented situations and lawsuits that, in retrospect, I should not have. The other thing is I sold to a publicly traded company, and we became the most meaningful portion of their revenue. And so all of a sudden, we started getting a ton of press around that every time the public company released earnings, their stock would blow up basically because, you know, publicly traded company, which was basically a sleeper. Endowment was zero growth, and in fact, was going downward and retracting. All of a sudden now had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on a quarterly basis and significant sums of profit. And so all of a sudden, all eyes were on us both from the media and from Wall Street. And we were not a fortified business model by any means. The other thing that occurred that was a big mistake was the publicly traded company couldn't afford to pass the urn out. So they persuaded us to go public. And as a result of that, now the son, my company has opposed to, you know, accelerating our growth and building fortification and building a strong infrastructure. My entire management team and everybody was focused on ringing the bell. I myself included, you know, there's such a gratifying idea that I would, you know, take this company from near bankruptcy to ringing the bell. We lost our focus and lost our, you know, our discipline to building a company and fortifying at that time we should have had done nothing but, you know, fortify for growth and continue to invest in growth related initiatives, not try to ring the bell and go public. We weren't ready for that. So there were a lot of things that we did wrong. There are a lot of mistakes that we made, you know, and, you know, some of the negative activity that we had was short seller enticed and that there was a, we were the number one most shorted stock and all of Wall Street for over a year. And so, you know, there was so many people that were trying to stimulate negative activity against us. And then there was plenty of things that we did that were, you know, just, you know, just the perfect storm, a perfect storm of everything. It was working mistakes. It was public too soon. It was short seller activity. It's all the shit coming together that probably caused you a few gray hairs too. Yeah, the second thing is, you know, all of a sudden you're putting up 100 million in profit, like every attorney in the world is looking to figure out a way that they can squeeze you. So the bigger you are, the bigger the target that you are. So I short sellers going after me. I had ambulance chaser is going after me, I'd competition going after me. And then I was, you know, also, I was not ready for that onslaught by any means. We had class action lawsuits that all eventually got settled, but a ton of them, like there was a class action lawsuit after class action lawsuit after class class action lawsuit over a billion dollars of class action lawsuits against us one given time one was for texting incorrectly. I had no idea that you weren't allowed to text people. Another one was for product efficacy that we ended up winning. And another one was for the way the IPO was handled, which I didn't know that I couldn't cite. You know, like you see Elon Musk trouble that he's going through like every time I tweet, I would have an SEC filing and another, you know, citing in a lawsuit. So I had no idea how to conduct myself as a publicly traded company and as a public figure by any means. Yeah, that's not that's not easy to say the land. And do you still stand by the like the core business model, like the direct selling multi level affiliate because that also has gotten just a lot of negative. So how do you do that model right. Yeah, you you can. So I will tell you you, you can very much do that model right. And there is a lot of good that comes from that model, but you have to be very careful because compensation drives behavior. And as you know, human behavior is very hard to calculate. And so you might very well be creating, you know, great ideas and great incentives and support that create behaviors that aren't an alignment with your personal values and brand. And when you have a million people out there marketing your company on your behalf, which we did, you're going to have a lot of of chaos. And you're going to have a lot of people that are doing it. And in ways that are not an alignment with your values and an alignment with the brands values. And so you have to have a strong compliance. You have to have strong policing of this. You have to be very rigid and tight. And it's a very difficult environment to do correctly. It's highly competitive. And you know, it's it's kind of like the wild wild west of sale. So I learned a ton from it. I'm no longer within the industry at all. So I can speak very objectively about it. And you know, when I can tell you that there's some some great things that come as a result of the industry, but then there's also some, you know, some chaos that it's a result as well. If you're not correct, if you're not disciplined and you're not forward thinking enough to understand the various things that could come your way. Some of these companies do create, you know, vehicles, marketing campaigns, messages, sales systems and compensation systems that are not great for the consumer. A quick break from this podcast to recommend another podcast. You have to check out. It's called the product boss is hosted by Jacqueline and Mina. It's part of the HubSpot podcast network. If you have a physical product, this podcast is hyper tailored to you. It's going to help you take your business to the next level. In a recent episode, for example, they spoke about the power of TikTok or product businesses and how to use it to drive sales. And as somebody who is a little new to TikTok, I really learned some great tips for creating content that actually converts viewers into customers. They have a workshop style format that makes it really easy to follow along to take your business to the next level. So if you sell physical products, subscribe to the product boss, wherever you get your podcast to unlock social media, marketing and business strategies that create your dream business and then your dream life. How do you as a advice to young entrepreneurs? How do you manage and how do you deal with that chaos? If you're successful, which is when all the chaos happens, right? What advice would you give somebody? Don't don't don't escape the drugs and alcohol, you know, that's a lesson that's probably a lot. Yeah, when, you know, you can imagine I had a million people selling for me of which I had about 10,000 full times people selling. So although I only had 580 full time team members at about 10,000 full time field members. And, you know, and that was a lot of responsibility and it all happened within 24 months. So I went from leading a company of about 70 people in total, actually less about 20 people in total to leading a company of about 10,000 people in total in less than 24 months. I grew too fast. I didn't have a grounded foundation. I was doing everything for external validation. I was, you know, I was chasing the next payday, the next award, the next best selling book. All external things, status seeking payday seeking. And then once I got those awards, those, you know, those, those ego boosts, those status, you know, adrenaline rushes, I, you know, I, I lost my sights on what I was really building. And also once the acquiring company took over and owned the majority of the company, I lost a lot of my equity incentive to build it. And so it is a story where, you know, a lot of people did do very well from it and investors made a lot of money. And, you know, I certainly did very well from it. But, you know, in, in retrospect, I was not nearly as successful as it could have been. And, you know, I had a business doing 100 million a year in sales. I'm sorry 100 million a year in profits. And that business no longer exists. So, you know, I say, yeah, I would say that it's, you know, it was a success for me personally. But, you know, I learned a lot. And I'm certainly not doing a lot of the same things I was doing back then in my present form as an entrepreneur. And, and you, so you sold that in 2012. And then what did you do? What did you do after you decompressed for a couple of years. Now we're now we're talking in 2022. I increased, I increased my compression. I, you know, I added more. You know, I, you know, first time I'd ever had a significant wealth, you know, tens of millions of dollars in my bank account. I, my own private jet as part of the deal to sell the business day. I had to buy me a plane. I had, you know, systems and, you know, some notoriety. And it got to my head. And so I, you know, traveled the world. And I continued on. You know, and as a more of a figurehead, I would say I was involved operationally, of course, but I wasn't as emotionally involved as I was on the way up. Once I got to this top of the mountain, I spent more time contemplating spending the money than I did making it. So that was from 2012. Also at the time I was facing some personal. Yes, I was going to say, how'd you handle that? How'd you handle the money? How'd you handle this ride? Like, were, were you okay? Like coming out of this? Like was it psychologically? I think you're going to dilute the speak to it in a second, but how did that impact you? Well, there's two other things that were going on that were very challenging. And that is one I had a young son with autism. Now that broke my heart tremendously to see him in constant pain and suffering and to not know how to handle that as a new father. I also had a mother that had fallen down a flight of stairs and was in a coma for two years. And after she woke up from the coma, it was just after I sold the business. She was severely handicapped for the rest of her life. And so there was a tremendous amount of family pressure on me as well as business pressure all at one time. And it was a pressure cooker. I didn't understand at the time I now have, you know, some clarity. I did end up decompressing. I decided to step down in 2016 from my role at Vysalos. I left as CEO. I left the board. I walked away from my venture fund that was a $20 million venture fund and cashed out there. And I walked away from boards and other private investments. And I went to basically zero. No business activity did nothing for a period of two years and just deeply went on a healing journey. My mother passed away during that time and I wanted to be with her and I didn't want to be distracted from my final days with her. And I knew that there was a lot of healing that needed to be done post her transition. And so I spent two years doing that. So I, you know, I wouldn't tell you I did it correctly at all. In fact, I love mentoring entrepreneurs now because, you know, the perspective that I have is really filled with experience that didn't work out. And so I can advise entrepreneurs through acquisitions and to venture funding and to public offerings and things like I do now, because I have had the experience of saying like these are some of the things you should be thinking about. None of my mentors ever really cared about how I was holding up. They just cared about me continuing to produce the gains and continuing to generate the returns. And so I like to mentor entrepreneurs in a way where I can help them really think more holistically about the actions that they're taking. No, it's smart. And I think that sometimes it takes somebody who is built a probably an almost almost billion dollar. Don't know what the valuation is, but it was it was up there for sure. But several hundred million dollar company to you. Yeah, 72 million was evaluation, but we did two billion in sales. So I tell people I just had $2 billion rolled through my hands and experimentation. So yeah, all you're buying for me if I'm mentoring you is that I've had $2 billion worth of experience. Some of us been very profitable and I've had some miserable failures. Like 25 million dollar failures here and 50 million dollar failures there and you know ton of failures, right. So I could I could tell you by way of my failures on the other end of it, I now have a lot of wisdom that I'm privileged to be able to share with people. And what are you okay? So what are you working on now? So what what is so you have you've written a book obviously that was out and I think a couple years ago. You're the book bottom. Yeah, okay, perfect. And now you're at alter call, correct. Yeah, so I've written a couple books. Nothing to lose everything to gain rock bottom to rock star. You can buy them wherever books are sold if you're interested, which talks about my entrepreneurial journey. After I published rock bottom to rock star, I went to the greatest rock bottom that I'd ever had in the loss of my mother. And during that time, I was faced not only with the loss of my mother, but I went through a custody battle. I did some things very abruptly and I was in a very difficult condition like the worst place that you can imagine. And I hit rock bottom in a way that I'd never imagined. It wasn't a financial rock bottom to the same way that I had experienced in the past. You know, I'd done all right and I'd made sure more than all right. I'd, you know, I'd add a great environment, great house, you know, basically I'd set up an environment where I could do some deep healing work. And I did nothing but deeply heal for two years. And during that period of time, I went deep into meditation and to breath work and to ancient wisdoms. I studied, I made my full time job healing me. Because of the way I was raised, the traumatic environment, the abuse of father and mother, the gang environment, I'd never healed any of that stuff. I just channeled it into an insatiable appetite for success. And I had brought that success in, but then the more success that I brought, the empty or I was, and I was an empty cup when my mother passed away. And I wasn't happy with my life. I wasn't happy with my friendships. I wasn't happy with anything. And so I went and rebuilt myself basically brick by brick during that time. And as I continued to build and build people would reach out to me for help and I would mentor people. And I started to envision creating a mentoring organization and being able to help entrepreneurs that are suffering from burnout that are stressed out that aren't making and maximizing the impact that aren't as productive as it could be or as impactful as it could be. That I'd be able to provide them the tools that I was learning to build a maximize their impact and maximize their productivity. And so I've been building systems, hiring team members and scaling that enterprise, which is called alter call now for the past two years after I emerged. You know, from the depths of this suffering that I had been experiencing. And and that time when you're when your mom passed, was that the point when you when you realized it that was the first set the first thing that was like a like I just just hit you. Like this is like nothing in my life. I'm actually content with even after reaching these upper echelons of success and having all this success in my life. That's the moment. So what you're trying to do now is you're trying to help people so that they don't have this breaking point at some point in their life. Yeah, well a little bit of like introspection and self-awareness, I guess is what you're focused on. Yeah, well, the part that my awakening is the best way to describe it occurred when my mom passed away. And the people that I had surrounded myself with did not have the love and empathy that I needed at the time. Now, that's my own fault. I surrounded myself with people that weren't loving an empathetic people, but I all the sudden needed a lot of it and it wasn't there. And so I went into a stage of isolation where I would not speak to anyone. I did a vales islands for months. I re-evaluated every aspect of my life, my friendships, my conduct, my way of being. And the thing that really hurt the most was I realized that I had taken time away that I could have had with her for these relationships and this behavior. And I was sick to my stomach that I had traded, you know, hangovers and late nights and partying and all this stuff. And I could have given that time to my mother and I could have had more time and more of a connection with her. And so I was devastated at the reality that I had wasted precious time with her. And I was so mad at myself and so mad at my environment and so mad at everything that it was the best way to describe it was like a nuclear bomb went off and I set fire to my old identity. You know, a lot of people had, you know, I was in a notable situation. So a lot of people had seen me as such. I had such a, you know, like a person who never flinches could be losing his mother be going through a son with autism. You know, getting sued a billion dollars and he's still showing up every single day and he's still pushing forward and, you know, once my mother passed away, those walls came crumbling down. And I had a reality check that that awakened me to, you know, to the reality of who I was to what my shadow was to who I was and I hated every piece of it. Now, in retrospect, I was probably really tough on myself there and overly tough because there was a lot of good that I've contributed. I've been always been a very generous person and I've helped a lot of people along the way. And, you know, I've always been a very loving father and so forth. But at that particular time, I didn't love a single thing about me. And so I said to myself, I'm going to put 100% of my energy into rebuilding me. And I'm going to do so in such a way that no matter what happens that I will know that I have built a better version of me when I come out of this against the odds that I was, you know, facing at the time. How do you, how do you get entrepreneurs to take a look at themselves and understand everything that you started to understand way earlier on in the game? You have to, you know, there's a great question. Most of us entrepreneurs, there's not very many people who have gone through the fire and come out the other end of it with more wisdom. And so you have to have a mentor that's gone through the fire in an amazing way because you are not going to be prepared to go through that fire. Like, there's no way anyone could have prepared me for what I experienced, right? Because, you know, if someone would have sat me down and said, you can have three million customers, a million this, you know, Wall Street after you, media after you, women after you, people trying to steal your money, you know, and, you know, your mother is going to pass away and your son's going to have autism. You know, let me give you some advice. I'd have been like, you know, no, thank you. So you got to have people around you on your corner that have been through the fire. And, you know, there's this archetype that occurs in this thing that we call the heroes journey and, you know, and consciousness work that we do. And you want to find people that have been through the fire that have been humbled as a result of it and that are now back with wisdom to teach. So that's the number one piece of advice that I give to entrepreneurs. And I take people, I take the entrepreneurs that I mentor through a process why help them see the true reality of where they're at, of who they are, how they're communicating. And you really see that and you're willing to look at your shadow and you become aware of the negative attributes and characteristics that you have to work on. That's when the real work begins and that's when the transformational work begins. So I help entrepreneurs go through a transformational process. Most of them are in the middle of a life change. You know, they're about to exit their company. One of my entrepreneurs that's part of my program just sold his company last week in a $75 million transaction. And, you know, I'm helping him think about these things as he's was, you know, it's helping him negotiate the transaction. Then as he's closed the transaction, now I'm helping him start to think about some things now that he's got a significant sum of money behind him and he's submitted himself. You know, as a successful entrepreneur, I'm helping him, you know, think about these things in a way that prevents him from creating some of the same challenges that I created as a result of not having good guidance and mentorship in the process. Do you think you believe that most entrepreneurs suffer from depression from some sort of psychological trauma? I never said this out loud before, but you just prompted me to think of something. And that is that in order to be a person that likes to take a lot of risk, you have to have had an environment that's conducive to that. It's rare to find a person. I mean, there might be a rare person that had a comfortable upbringing and just decides they want to take risk. But generally, when you have a high appetite for risk in general, you're going to have to have some conditions that stimulated that appetite for risk. And that could be a traumatic upbringing. That could be, you know, you extracted some lessons in a certain way based on seeing your parents financial scarcity. Or by the way, your parents raised you, but in general, there's something that stimulates you to be very risk oriented to be successful. You got to take a lot of risk. Very interesting. No, I've had this conversation a few times. It's just not something that we we cover or talk about enough. We talk too much about the hustle culture and the grinding on stop and whatnot. And actually, you took it a step further with that point. The fact that to even to want to do this, there's something there's something. There's something in you that just prompts you to go down the highest risk. Most, you know, most treacherous, most, you know, unstable job option you could ever want to do. Somebody taking risks high risk in their sex life for high risk in their nutritional life, you'd be like, that's that person's off their, they're out of their mind. Yeah, you're taking high risk in their career. And you're like, I want to follow them and be an entrepreneur just like that person. So high risk is high risk. Yeah. And and how do you? Okay. So when you work with some of these entrepreneurs, what are some, let's just give over up. There's obviously a lot of tactical device, but an entrepreneur that's trying to stay the course, navigate all these different things that are coming up. Very successful things are moving quickly. What are some things that you teach over to entrepreneurs so that they can, you know, navigate this stuff well. Yeah, well, one, you have to make time and I did not do this, but you have to make time and your highest priority has to be that you're taking care of your own self love and energy conditioning. You have to make the time for that and you have to make that your number one priority because you cannot serve from an empty cup. And I was trying to serve from an empty cup and I needed to use caffeine and aterol and different substances to keep serving and keep serving because I wasn't replenishing correctly. The other thing is is you have to learn how to master the mind. I always was very competitive, so I was very strong in the body, but I thought meditation was a gimmick. I thought it was stupid. I thought it was for, you know, gurus at war weird, weird clothes and, you know, not me. I'm an ADD caffeine drinking entrepreneur. I want to go, go, go. And what I've come to learn in my meditation practices, meditation actually enhances your intelligence, it enhances your IQ, it crowns you, it helps you process. And so spending time in meditation and most importantly, contemplation, I spend at least an hour plus a day in meditation and in contemplation. I'd say it's probably averaging two hours a day and I do that before I enter, you know, my day of work and I'm often up at 4 4 30 a.m. doing this work. So by the time I arrive to my team, I've already processed, I've let go of the negativity from the prior day. I've learned something, I've learned something about myself. And so I've generally won and I've also exercised and eat a nutritious meal prior to even entering my day. So by the time that I show up to work, I've already won the day. Now all I have to do is apply what I've learned, you know, not react, you know, try to have as much passion and kindness and empathy as I possibly can. And my day is basically heaven on earth now because I've done this enough days consistently to where I have a full cup to serve each day that I walk into. And and how do you so you're saying that that practice effectively replaces the go go go at or all fueled caffeine fueled like fossil cult because like I just want to make sure that if you're reinventing yourself and trying to be more mindful. Is there any benefit at all to having a little bit of that crazy attitude towards hustle and getting shit done. Does that benefit entrepreneur or you're saying let's that's like a legacy view of entrepreneurship. Let's shelve that and let's approach it completely differently. It's not the most sustainable way to go but it's it's a great fuel source but you will crash and it has a half life to it. And many entrepreneurs I know, you know, we love that fuel source and you're being fueled off generally the negative you're being fueled off the desire to impress people you're being filled off the desire to prove yourself you're being filled off a desire to you know to have status or you're being fueled off something right and that's the go go go on not going to stop. And you'll hear a lot of gurus out there modern to gurus will talk about you have to be obsessed you have to be obsessed which you know I understand that that idea and I you know I have a fair amount of of you know of drive and ambition that is innate within me and so I do understand that but I would argue that the most sustainable fuel source is the fuel source of service and of contribution. And so if you can move off of these lower frequency fuel sources and on to a fuel source that is more sustainable and learn how to utilize that fuel source you have a more sustainable right and you'll have more impact. I was afraid that I would lose productivity when I you know I thought that maybe I'll never be as good of an entrepreneur as I once was I had that thought when I did two years worth of the deep journey and word I thought like maybe I'll never be you know maybe it is a great entrepreneurship is a product that is a great entrepreneur. It was a product of some screws that are loose and I've come to learn now that I'm more productive I'm more efficient I have greater clarity I make better decisions and I have more consistency and I ever dreamed of. And so I know without a doubt what I am building now will far surpass anything that I've ever built I just have to build it for enough days in a row consecutively consistently and now I have the tools to do that. And entrepreneurship is not that hard once you learn you know the fundamentals of it you learn about leadership you learn about finance you learn about supply chain and technology and project management and you know there's maybe ten buckets you have to learn to become a great entrepreneur. And if you learn those ten buckets and efficient enough way you don't have to be a master at all ten but you have to learn enough about them to get some masters in all ten of those buckets then entrepreneurship is very easy as long as you have an idea and an addressable market that is significant enough to you know to you know for your solution to provide an answer to their problem then it's not too difficult at all once you've learned these things but the process of learning takes a while it takes an average of about five years to build. Five years to build a foundation in a business and I have a number of friends that are very successful entrepreneurs and you know they'll start a new business guy could be a billionaire and it's going to take five years for that billionaire to build something of significant so most entrepreneurs just don't put in the time and they don't really understand that your first five years are going to be painful it's not going to be easy but once you build that solid foundation the house goes up very quickly. And last sort of last question on this point you spoken a lot about conscious capitalism what does that mean that's how you actually build the business right yeah that's not like you that's like the type of business you build or explain that's right yeah there's a shift happening right now in capitalism and and a product of it is is there's a lot of people that are against capitalism they think capitalism is a root of all evil we're hearing people even suggest that we should become socialists and I'm here to tell you that is just absolutely ridiculous. Capitalism is brought more people out of poverty than any other force it creates innovation and capitalism is going to solve the very problems that we are up against but there are two types of capitalism there is conscious capitalism and that's the people like ourselves that are building products that are making the world a better place that are building entities that are conscious. That are that are meeting the needs of employees that are treating their team members with respect and dignity that are providing growth opportunities like there's conscious capitalism and then there's unconscious capitalism and that's people that are doing things for the sake of power doing things for the sake of greed doing things for the sake of ego or even manipulating governments and creating cronism and and you know it's a form of capitalism basically that is not to the benefit of the people and to the benefit of the market. It's more to the benefit of the owners and into those who are in control or in power of it and so we need to create a line in the ground because capitalism is being attacked right now and we need to say on one side of the fence we have conscious capitalist and on the other side of the fence we have unconscious capitalist and the conscious capitalist need to create business models that are so much more effective and so much more profitable and create so much more value and retain so much better talent and cultivate and develop talent for that matter. That the unconscious capitalist find their way either moving over to the other side of the fence or becoming extinct. So where I was seeking to disrupt to disrupt the direct selling industry in my last life as an entrepreneur I'm now seeking to disrupt capitalism and create conscious models and help other capitalist create conscious models and and change capitalism as a result of these more effective and efficient conscious models. Amazing man when I want to ask some rapid fire just to close it out but before I pivot when it's all said and done when you know you're old and and or you know one day you're going to pass on what do you want what do you want people to say about you but the work that you've done what impressions you want to leave on the world. You know I'm a great father and I've got a great son and that you know he's he's taking the wisdom that I've given him to the next level and that I've spread a lot of light and that there's my dream is and I that reason why I so love the idea of disrupting capitalism as I know that some of the beneficiaries of my my work are going to be my competition and are going to be people that I'll never meet. So I would like my legacy to be that Ryan had no idea of the impact that he made because he just kept his head down making that impact every day of the week. Amazing and people want to connect with you all the socials website anywhere you want to send people where should they go. Go to alter call dot com it's a L T E R C L L dot com or you can catch on Instagram which is at real Ryan Blair on Instagram and if you DM me I'll be happy to have an exchange with you. Sounds good. Okay perfect and we'll put all that in the show notes too. Okay a couple of rapid fire questions biggest challenge you've overcome in your personal professional life what was it had you overcome it what you learn from it. The biggest challenge to overcome has been my ego. That's that's number one I've been up against a lot of enemies and the internal enemy that I had created and cultivated unintentionally was the biggest one how to overcome it I did some deep work and I started to really think about the ego and started to really after I got a lot of negative feedback and I you know saw a lot of negative patterns occurring. I said I got to go do some work over here. I'm dying by question. Yeah you did you're good you're good I know you touched on that in detail before so I'm not going to not keep going down and beating it to death. If you had to choose one person obviously if it's been many pick one person who's had a major impact on your life who is that person and what do they teach you. My son you know he struggles with autism and now on the other end of it you know he's healed and he's just smart and resourceful and he's a total negotiator he out negotiates me all the time and I'm pretty good at this and I'm just amazed like there's the other day he figured out a way to get some money out of my pocket and I was like wow like I've got a negotiator on my hands one day. I hope he solves a real piece or some other big noble project with the negotiation skills that he's obtained thus far and he's only 12 so my son is my greatest teacher and and my best friend. I love that a book or podcast or something that's impacted your life the recommend people go check out. I'm a very spiritual person so I turn to the Bible based on my faith and my upbringing but I encourage people of all faiths you know these ancient wisdoms that have been around for thousands of years. The reason why they're still around is because there is deep wisdom within it and so I recommend go to the ancient books go go think about the wisdom within these books and the stories they're still being told to this day and try to extract. From those stories and those wisdoms that's where I spend most of my time but I read a ton of books and I'll share with you one that I'm reading right now that's you know that's more practical and that is conscious business by a guy named Fred Kaufman who is a fantastic conscious business leader and so I recommend his book to anyone that's interested. Amazing if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be. I don't do drugs don't you know don't do alcohol and I'd say if you don't do drugs and you don't do alcohol you're going to make a lot better decisions in your life and your life is going to be a lot happier. Pretty much that's it. Have you have you stopped drinking too. I don't I don't do anything I quit drinking going on four years three yeah going on four years now and you know I I don't I live a very pure lifestyle now. Yeah very good okay and last question what a success mean to you. Success is having the peace of mind I'm quoting John Wooden here also was a very dear mentor to me and I'll paraphrase it success is having the peace of mind of knowing that you did the best you could with what you have. And I I'm still not successful by that measure because I still have not done the best I can with what I have because I know that I'm blessed to have so much so every single day that definition has me seeking to make improvements and to continue to dial in you know my mind my body and my soul. So that way I can be as productive and as generous in my role as I possibly can be. you