The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair

Summary

Episode Summary: The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair

Podcast: Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Host: John Gafford
Guest: Ryan Blair
Release Date: March 19, 2025
Episode Title: The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair

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1. Introduction

In this compelling episode of Escaping the Drift, host John Gafford sits down with Ryan Blair, a multifaceted entrepreneur renowned for turning around distressed companies and authoring bestsellers like Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain and Rock Bottom to Rock Star. Ryan shares his tumultuous journey from a troubled youth to a multi-millionaire, emphasizing the pivotal role mentorship played in his transformation.

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2. Ryan Blair's Early Life and Challenges (02:47 – 10:56)

Ryan Blair opens up about his challenging upbringing in the Los Angeles area. Raised in a middle-class family, his father, an aerospace engineer, struggled with cocaine addiction, which plunged the household into chaos. This environment exposed Ryan to drugs and violence from a young age.

At [07:08], Ryan recounts his early involvement in hustling marijuana, trading it for items like snakes and skateboards even before turning 11. His life took a drastic turn when, at 15 years old ([09:31]), he faced severe legal consequences for a minor altercation that escalated into charges of armed robbery and battery. Recognizing the inevitable path towards becoming a professional criminal, Ryan wrote a heartfelt letter to his judge pleading for leniency. Impressed by his sincerity, the judge offered him a chance to avoid prison on the condition that Ryan pursue higher education ([10:53]). This moment ignited Ryan's desire to change his life's trajectory.

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3. The Role of Mentorship (11:05 – 13:33)

Ryan attributes a significant portion of his turnaround to the mentorship he received. Through his mother, he met a wealthy real estate professional who took him under his wing. This mentor introduced Ryan to motivational literature from figures like Tony Robbins and Dale Carnegie, even incentivizing him financially to engage with these materials ([11:07]). Beyond reading, Ryan was entrusted with responsibilities such as evicting tenants, which not only honed his real estate skills but also instilled a strong work ethic.

By [12:56], Ryan emphasizes the importance of giving back, stating, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." He views mentorship not just as a professional obligation but as a spiritual mission to aid others in overcoming their struggles and achieving success.

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4. Entrepreneurial Journey and Successes (13:35 – 20:17)

Encouraged by his mentor, Ryan pursued higher education in computer science, which enabled him to secure a lucrative job in the tech field by his 20th year. However, his entrepreneurial spirit soon took over. Frustrated with corporate structures, Ryan founded his own technology company, 247 Tech, which provided network troubleshooting services. His ability to pivot and adapt led him to explore various technology ventures, including developing inspection software for schools in Florida.

One of Ryan's most notable achievements was acquiring and scaling a broadband wireless services company. At just 24 years old, he successfully raised $3 million in venture capital, scaled the business, and sold it for a $24 million transaction ([19:35]). This feat underscores his knack for identifying undervalued assets and transforming them into profitable enterprises.

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5. Leadership and Management Insights (20:17 – 32:36)

When discussing how to turn around a struggling company, Ryan outlines a methodical approach:

• Scoring Employees: Immediately assess team members, categorizing them as A, B, or C performers. Eliminate underperformers ("C's") and encourage mid-level performers ("B's") to elevate their performance ([24:07]).

• Rebuilding the Team: Utilize a dedicated recruiting team to backfill roles with top talent, ensuring that the company is staffed with highly capable individuals who can drive growth ([24:32]).

• Cost-Cutting and Optimization: Implement zero-based budgeting to strip down expenditures to the essentials, ensuring that every expense has a clear return on investment ([25:19]).

• Cultivating a Performance-Driven Culture: Shift the company mindset from one of spending to one of saving, fostering a culture where every team member is aligned with the company's financial and operational goals ([25:48]).

Ryan emphasizes the importance of "essentializing" the business to maintain service levels while eliminating unnecessary costs. He states, "The truth is in the math," highlighting his data-driven approach to decision-making ([25:48]).

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6. Personal Development and Productivity (33:16 – 43:38)

Ryan delves into his personal strategies for maintaining high performance and resilience:

• Input-Output Ratio: Ryan monitors his energy levels by balancing inputs (e.g., meditation, exercise) with outputs (e.g., work tasks). On days when he's drained, he focuses on recharging his energy reserves ([42:12]).

• Biohacking for Better Sleep: He mentions using devices like the Poeto to stimulate the vagus nerve, enhancing sleep quality without medication ([51:15]).

• Finding Joy in Daily Activities: Ryan maintains a list of activities that rejuvenate him, such as hitting a speed bag or dancing, ensuring that he can quickly shift his mindset when faced with challenges ([54:10]).

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7. Giving Back and Mentorship Philosophy (43:38 – 64:00)

A recurring theme in Ryan's narrative is the importance of giving back and fostering mentorship relationships:

• Reciprocal Mentorship: Ryan believes in mutual benefit within mentorship, where both mentor and mentee contribute meaningfully to each other's growth. He advises potential mentees to first seek ways to add value to their mentors' lives before seeking assistance ([62:11]).

• Conspiracy of Giving: He introduces the concept of a "conspiracy of giving," where multiple individuals collaborate to give anonymously, thereby multiplying the positive impact without seeking recognition ([55:55]).

• Legacy Building: Through acts of generosity, Ryan aims to create lasting legacies and inspire others to continue the tradition of mentorship and community support.

Ryan underscores that true leadership involves serving others selflessly. He shares his method of involving others in acts of giving, thereby unlocking multiple blessings and fostering a supportive community ([56:35]).

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8. Key Takeaways and Conclusions (64:00 – End)

As the episode concludes, Ryan offers invaluable advice to aspiring entrepreneurs:

• Seek Multiple Mentors: "Get a mentor. Pursue multiple mentors. Keep going until you find somebody." Mentorship is crucial for gaining diverse perspectives and accelerating personal growth ([59:20]).

• Acquire and Optimize Skills: Emphasizing that "skills pay the bills," Ryan advises continuous learning and skill acquisition as foundational to entrepreneurial success ([59:38]).

• Authenticity in Relationships: Building genuine, reciprocal relationships is essential. Authenticity fosters trust and creates meaningful connections that support both personal and professional development ([63:00]).

John and Ryan reflect on the profound impact of mentorship and the importance of balancing business acumen with personal integrity and generosity. They highlight that true success lies not just in financial achievements but also in the ability to uplift others and contribute positively to the community.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ryan Blair [04:32]: "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

• Ryan Blair [25:48]: "The truth is in the math."

• Ryan Blair [33:28]: "You have to have the belief that you believe you can learn any skill."

• Ryan Blair [62:11]: "Help me clean up your yard, your garage. What can I do for you?"

• Ryan Blair [63:00]: "The greatest gift that we can give is one where we have no intention of anything in return whatsoever."

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Conclusion

This episode of Escaping the Drift provides a profound exploration of how mentorship can transform lives and propel individuals from adversity to remarkable success. Ryan Blair's journey underscores the significance of seeking guidance, fostering reciprocal relationships, and maintaining unwavering personal growth. His insights offer a roadmap for listeners aspiring to escape their own drifts and achieve excellence in their endeavors.

Transcript

[John Gafford]

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[Henry Meds]

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[John Gafford]

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[Ryan Blair]

I was trained to cultivate marijuana. Bag it. I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood at 11, even before that. So marijuana, we grew it. You know, we bagged it. I would give it away. I trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood love me because I just hand them handfuls of it. Yeah, drugs are in my house from the very beginning.

[John Gafford]

And now, escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along. Escape the Drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another. Says in the beginning, man, an episode of the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, ladies and gentlemen, in the studio with me is a guy, and this is a dude, man, that had a troubled youth, ran around with gangs, did a bunch of nonsense in the streets, but turn it around and became a multi millionaire. He is the former CEO and founder of Visala Scientists Sciences, which is a company that went from basically being $6 million in debt when he showed up to $150 million in revenue within 16 months. So the dude knows how to turn it around. He's the best selling author of the books nothing to lose, Everything to Gain, a New York Times number one hardcover business bestseller, and rock bottom to rock star in 2016. A guide to achieving entrepreneurial excess success. Good Lord, man, I'm struggling today. So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Ryan Blair.

[Ryan Blair]

Ryan, thank you for having me, John.

[John Gafford]

I think they took too much blood out of me this morning. I was stumbling there a little bit.

[Ryan Blair]

I had a lot of entrepreneurial excess.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, excess. It was. It was. Yeah. So. So for. If you're listening to this, I had to go do my every three month blood work so my wife can keep me alive forever today. And yeah, I think they took too much because, man, that was a little struggle.

[Ryan Blair]

Oh, that's all right. It's early in the morning.

[John Gafford]

I thought I was having a stroke. Halfway through that, I didn't know it was good. It's because I've been, I was fasted. I'm now drinking, drinking my protein as we do this interview. So if you hear me gulping, that's what it is. But dude, Ryan, man, obviously, you know, you've got so many different levels of things you've done in your life, but I'm always curious when you have somebody that's an entrepreneur that reaches those high levels of success. And if you've listened to the program before, you probably know we always kind of like to start with that nature versus nurture argument. So tell me about young Ryan. Tell me about you, man. Where did you grow up? What was that like?

[Ryan Blair]

So I grew up in the Los Angeles area. My dad was an engineer. Really brilliant man. My mom was a housemaker, a lot of love. And they both got addicted to drugs and I was a child, so my house was in turmoil and trauma and violence. Brothers and sisters all went to prison.

[John Gafford]

So wait, dad was an engineer? So he's a professional guy?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, yeah, he was an aerospace engineer. So he was very intelligent. In fact, too intelligent. His mind got the best of him basically toward and.

[Progressive Insurance]

Wow.

[John Gafford]

So that you normally hear those stories from, from terrible situations of socioeconomic, you know, hardship.

[Ryan Blair]

I was in the middle class, so in the middle class, dad had a hundred thousand dollar plus salary. This is the.

[John Gafford]

How does dad start using drugs? Do you know? Like, how does this happen?

[Ryan Blair]

Cocaine.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, everybody was doing it in the 80s. It's kind of how it was.

[Ryan Blair]

And you know, he, he was, you know, in the middle class, doing really well economically. He had some vices and, you know, some self sabotaging behaviors. He's, he's no longer with us. So I've, I've healed my relationship with him spiritually, so to speak.

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

But yeah, yeah, his brain got the best of him. So he had a lot of unhealed things that he was dealing with.

[John Gafford]

How old were you when you knew this was going on?

[Ryan Blair]

It was always in my life, so there's always marijuana, always weird stuff going on, always violence. But I recognized that we had a drug problem in the household at about 11 years old or so. I knew that that was a problem.

[John Gafford]

Oh man.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. But I would, I would, I was trained to Cultivate marijuana, bag it. I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood at 11, even before that. So marijuana, we grew it, you know, we bagged it. I would give it away. I trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood love me because I just hand them handfuls of it. Yeah. Drugs are in my house from the very beginning.

[John Gafford]

Oh, my gosh. So I ask what your first hustle was, but I guess it was giving.

[Ryan Blair]

Trading bags of weed for skateboard two paper routes. I had a little marijuana distribution business, but I didn't understand the value of it. You know, I'd give them probably a pound for a snake, and they'd be.

[John Gafford]

Like, you know, did you know that this was illegal? I mean, did. Did the. Did the. The weight of that sink in at you at that time?

[Ryan Blair]

No, no. I mean, I was raised. My dad had a criminal element to him, and I, you know, to. I knew it was illegal, meaning that if the cops came, this was a problem. But I didn't understand the consequences of criminal behavior by any means because it was just naturally a part of my environment. You were just exposed to it. Yeah.

[John Gafford]

So. So at what point? So obviously you start this at 11.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, this is.

[John Gafford]

You said everybody went to jail. Who went to jail?

[Ryan Blair]

Brother went to jail for One brother went to jail for armed robbery. Another brother went to jail for. Many times. My sister went to prison many times. And then one sister was the good sister. She was a straight A student. She kept to herself. She read books. Everybody else, you know, we acted out on our trauma, went their own way. Yeah, she went internal and we all went external.

[John Gafford]

Where is she? How's she doing?

[Ryan Blair]

She's doing great. She's amazing. She ended up marrying a police officer, you know, and so one side of my family was criminals and the other side were cops.

[John Gafford]

Interesting family reunion, for sure.

[Ryan Blair]

Quite fascinating conversations.

[John Gafford]

I have a buddy of mine. I have a buddy of mine. Literally that half of his, like, he's got relatives in the dea.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

And then he's. He's married to a Latina woman and she has relatives in the cartel.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

So that's always an interesting mixing of folks when they need to mix them.

[Ryan Blair]

The. There's only a small degree of separation between a cop and a criminal. There. There's a fraction of a percentage, because to be a great cop, you have to be able to catch a criminal, so you have to be able to think like one. You have to have some of the same attributes. You just have, you know, values that steer you toward the Law. As opposed to away from it?

[John Gafford]

Yeah. All right, so growing up in this, did you ever get. Do you ever get in trouble? Like, there's trouble?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, I. I was facing four years in juvenile hall, and I was being. I was being sent.

[John Gafford]

What you do?

[Ryan Blair]

Allegedly strong. Armed robbery.

[John Gafford]

Oh, my God.

[Ryan Blair]

And battery.

[John Gafford]

And you mugged somebody?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

How old were you?

[Ryan Blair]

15.

[John Gafford]

And it was just a. This was just the group of guys you're running with. It's what you did?

[Ryan Blair]

No, they. They placed a case on me. So I was in a gang, and I got in a fight with an older guy, and he was over 18 years old, and I took his hat off his head in the fight. And so they. They loaded me up with charges. Now, because I had a public defender, and I didn't know any better, you know, I was. I was going to prison. If you have a wealthy family that can hire a good attorney, you'd never get, you know, come on.

[John Gafford]

The scales of justice are blind, I thought. I think you never.

[Ryan Blair]

You'd never get armed robbery for taking a hat off a person's head during a fist fight.

[John Gafford]

It was a hat.

[Ryan Blair]

I took a hat. But. But, you know, my mom didn't know any better. And so next thing you know, I'm heading to four years in prison. And I knew that because of the path of some of my family members and people in my neighborhood, in the event that I went to prison, it was. I was done. I'd be a professional criminal because I was very smart. I was very capable of creating a lot of problems. I was leading over 100 people in the gang I was in at a very young age. And so I knew that once I went to jail, I was done. So I. I wrote the judge a letter begging for leniency. He granted it to me under the condition that I never returned to see him again. And he told me I should be writing in college, not in prison. And that changed my life because no one had ever believed I should go to college at all. I was dropout, went to a continuation high school, and all of a sudden, this man believes I should be writing in college. And so I had the dream to become a writer at that point.

[John Gafford]

Okay, all right, so. So you had your GED at this point?

[Ryan Blair]

No, no, I was 15 years old. Got my GED shortly after that. Then a mentor came into my life, and he was in real estate, and he was a very wealthy person.

[John Gafford]

Let's talk about that. How did you meet your mentor?

[Ryan Blair]

So he started dating my mom. And because my mom was you know, near and dear to me. She's no longer with me. I was, I protected her. The neighborhood we lived in. I wouldn't allow any man to come near her. I had to be very protective of her. We were worried about drive bys where I was always worried about her being killed. And so she said, I met this man. He's a good man, he's wealthy, he's in real estate, and he wants to meet you. And I thought to myself, this is my way out of the ghetto, right? And I had the meeting with him and, and he was very harmless, nice man. And next thing you know, my life changed.

[John Gafford]

What, so did he offer to mentor you right away? It was just kind of okay. Did he, did he stay with your mom for long term? Who was with him longer? You, you or your mom?

[Ryan Blair]

He. He took me under his wing. It was a grace. By the grace of God, he took me under his wing immediately. You saw I had tattoos all over me. You saw I was heading in the wrong direction. He gave me motivational personal growth materials like lead the field, Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie. He insisted that I read these things. In fact, he paid me to read them. He bribed me because I wouldn't have otherwise. He said, I'll buy you new clothes to go get a job if you just read this book. And so he really leaned in on me. Then he gave me his job as what they. Back then, they called it a person Friday. And because I was a big kid, I was tough. He would have me do evictions for him. So I'd knock on the doors of his rentals and I would evict people. And, you know, that was my job, is to process serve, basically process serving of that.

[John Gafford]

So, you know, it's so important, I think, especially at any point of your life, if you want to get to that next level to find people that will mentor you. And, you know, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. So have you given back to others in that same way, or is that the biggest joy of what you do now?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, the. You know, when there's an old. There's a proverb, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So my job is to give to anyone that's ready. Right? I, I pay it forward as much as I can. And because I'm a spiritual person, you know, my desire to mentor people is really beyond that. I think of, you know, traditional, like coaching or something of that nature. I really see it as an assignment. I, I'm here To help this person through whatever season that I've been assigned to. If they're suffering from, you know, trauma, addiction, or if they're just trying to scale a business and figuring out how to. To rise to that level of success, I'm there to mentor them.

[John Gafford]

Okay. Did you. Did you go to college?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

Okay, so.

[Ryan Blair]

So he insisted. My mentor insisted I went to college.

[John Gafford]

So you started just community college, I'm assuming.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, went to community college, and then from there it turned out, because in the. Used to steal computers and I used to have to reprogram them, and I was really good at that. That was my racket. And this was at a time when computers were, you know, very valuable. The skill of computer programming and computer engineering was highly coveted, and people were paying good money for it. So I went to college, studied computer science, and then got a job in the computer sciences field and took off. My career accelerated right away. By the time I was about 20 years old, I was making over a hundred thousand dollars a year and going to college in the computer sciences field.

[John Gafford]

Just doing that.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

So at what point? Because like most. Most great serial entrepreneurs, like I like to say, are chronically unemployable.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, right. Just.

[John Gafford]

You just can't work for somebody else. At what point did you realize you were unemployable?

[Ryan Blair]

We. So the company I worked for, the engineering company, bought a company out of Las Vegas that did player tracking and player management for the casinos. And they dispatched me to meet with the casino heads and to meet with their heads of IT and to develop the product and to actually be a part of the sales of the product. I said, I'm developing the product, I'm selling the product. Why do I have to have these other boneheads in the room with me? And that's what had me go out of my own and start my own technology.

[John Gafford]

So that was the first thing was a technology company for casinos, Was it that?

[Ryan Blair]

No, it was just tech in general. It was called 247 Tech. Our byline was, if your network is a wreck, called 247 Tech. And I just dispatched network technicians to help people with network issues.

[John Gafford]

I love that, dude. We. In my previous life, right, I was a partner at a tech firm called Pattern Recognition at the time. It's so funny now, tech is such an interesting business to be in, and because very rarely do you land on what your original core mission was. Right. You just never land on it. So there was a program at the time. This may ring a bell for you, but they had software called Marimba and it was essentially where you could manage endpoints remotely.

[Ryan Blair]

Oh yeah.

[John Gafford]

So instead of having to go into a company and drop, you know, a thousand new Windows CDs into the computers, see information kids used to come on these silver shiny desk, the blue screen you had to manually put them in. And what this software did was allow us to manage a lot of endpoints remotely. And it was really just for big companies because it was very expensive. But we convinced Marimba.

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[Ryan Blair]

In the red corner, the.

[John Gafford]

Undisputed undefeated weed whacker guys champions champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere.

[Ryan Blair]

And in the blue corner, the challenger.

[John Gafford]

Extra strength Hadaday eye drops that work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes.

[Ryan Blair]

And the winner by knockout is Pattern Day.

[John Gafford]

Bring it on to let us sell it to mid and small size businesses as you know, under a different umbrella. And anyway, you know we were doing that and randomly one of our texts was like hey, you know the, the Clay county school board in Florida wants us, wants help with this inspection software. You know, just on Palm pilots where these guys can go into buildings and it pulls up the previous Inspection. And then they do this and it makes purchase orders stupid, right? Can we do it? And we're like, I mean, I guess, yeah, it's going to generate some money. We'll do it. Everything shifted into that business and it's just so funny. We worked so hard to get this relationship with Marimba. We end up letting it go very quickly and went all in on these inspection softwares that turned into like fire inspection and private jet inspection, all this stuff.

[Ryan Blair]

That's great. So that's a tribute to your ability to pivot well.

[John Gafford]

So the question becomes with this, because I think there's a lot of your story that you're gifted with that. So I'm curious. The reason I tell that story is not for any kind of self indulgence, but it's because I want to hear, like, what was your core mission of your original tech firm and where did you land?

[Ryan Blair]

So I pivoted. I went to go raise venture capital and they said that my business model was unscalable. It was hard, and I was, I was devastated. You know, I took these meetings with very esteemed venture capitalists and they looked at me and they said, this is, this isn't going to work.

[John Gafford]

Not going to happen.

[Ryan Blair]

Not going to happen. So there was a broadband wireless services company, and this was when, prior to broadband being Ubiquit ubiquitous, I was doing about 15,000amonth of revenue. I bought the company and then scaled it up and sold it. And a $24 million transaction when I was. $25 million transaction. I was 24.

[John Gafford]

Well, let's talk about that. Let's not. Don't run over that. How'd you, How'd you buy a company? How'd you do at 24?

[Ryan Blair]

I. I leveraged my credit cards. You know, I, I bought at 21, I sold it 24.

[John Gafford]

So no seller financing, nothing. You just.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, I just.

[John Gafford]

What'd you pay for it?

[Ryan Blair]

$15,000 all in for this company. Well, then I raised some venture capital because I'd had, I'd met some VCs. I raised about 3 million in venture capital about 21 years old. Leverage that to then scale the business and then sold it at 24.

[John Gafford]

Well, let's talk about this, man, because obviously such a big part of your history, and I don't want to, I don't want to just jump over Visalis. I want to talk about that. How. Well, let's talk about that first thing and we'll, we'll talk about the overall concepts of how you do turnarounds. So how did you, how did you come into Visalis?

[Ryan Blair]

Two entrepreneurs that were struggling with a vitamin company came to me at Skypipeline, the company that I was operating. It was VC funded. I took an interest in them. They told me about their business model. It was highly scalable, external salesforce. I had a friend, one of my investors at Skypeline owned a company called Party Like Candles and they had a 60,000 person home party business that was doing, you know, billions in sales. So I thought to myself that I could get them involved and I could help these two young entrepreneurs. That's what I did.

[John Gafford]

So you can put that together?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

So. So my first question about that, I mean, obviously when you got involved, I mean the place was negative and you left it $150 million?

[Ryan Blair]

No. Well, I bought it. I organized the buyout at about 20,000amonth, scaled it to 65 million a month, and then sold it.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, I mean, so, okay, so where did you learn how to do this?

[Ryan Blair]

You learn everything as you go. That's the secret. Everybody that we see like Elon Musk and everybody, they just learn it as they go. Every day you wake up and you learn it as you go. None of these people had any of the stuff figured out that they have figured out now when they started. It's just every day you have to have principles and a philosophy to figure it out as you go.

[John Gafford]

Dude, that is such the right answer.

[Ryan Blair]

That's it. And you meet these people that are doing remarkable things and you go to tour Elon's facility now and you say, how could I ever get to this level? He figured it out as he went every day. He made mistakes, he made errors, he took risks that were absurd and dumb. And he figured it out as he went and he just got better. Every day to now is Elon Musk that we know.

[John Gafford]

I find the biggest thing holding people back and success in so many different businesses. They feel that they're lacking in something they don't have, be it knowledge, information, capital, whatever. And they just see it as an insurmountable thing that they can't go get this stuff. And the answer is all high performers just figure it out.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. And every, every problem.

[John Gafford]

You didn't, you didn't learn how to approach a VC in a classroom, correct?

[Ryan Blair]

No, no, not at all. I didn't learn very much in a classroom at all. Even though I did go to computer sciences. And then eventually they're not teaching about VC capital raising. I took some business classes and some marketing classes that were Very valuable as part of my, you know, my program. But no, it was all self learning for the most part. And then mentorship, mentorship. You know, I called in great people onto my board. I great people in my corner. I had people around me that held me accountable, drove me and were impatient with me. You know, they, they, they did not like that I was underperforming. And as a result of having people that were way outside of my league on my board and as advisors, I had to constantly raise my level of competency and my level of character non stop throughout my career.

[John Gafford]

Okay, so how do you get that, how do you get those, that level of player to believe in you at an early age? How do you do it?

[Ryan Blair]

One, you know, one, you have to have the belief that, that you know, you're worthy of, of their mentorship. 2 and what people don't understand, every great leader, entrepreneurs and so forth, has a mentor in their corner. The VCs act as a good VC is a good mentor. A good private equity group is a good mentor. So when you hear about these massively funded companies that have these huge exits, there's mentors involved in that entrepreneur's life. They're keeping them accountable and helping them from stopping self sabotaging behaviors and helping them scale in their leadership. Otherwise the companies fall or go backward.

[John Gafford]

Well, yeah, they're not just going to write you a check and walk away. No such thing as a silent partner in the VC world.

[Ryan Blair]

No. And in fact they're going to write a check and then they're going to beat the crap out of you until you perform.

[John Gafford]

Be very involved in all of those things. Well, let's talk about your system for turning companies around. Yeah, like when you first walk in. Let's walk me through. Let's, let's say you just took over widget company X and you walk in. What are we doing?

[Ryan Blair]

Well, if I buy the company.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, you just, you just bought a company. So walk me through. Let's walk. Let's turn a fictional company around. You and I right here.

[Ryan Blair]

I would immediately score every person on the team A, B or C and I would eliminate all the Cs and I'd tell the Bs you better upgrade to A. I would have a recruiting group that I have on staff right now, which I have on staff, start backfilling the roles prior to me showing up. So that way I have talent lined up that wants to be a part of the opportunity. I'd move in, I cut people as fast as I possibly could and I Cut all the fat out of the business.

[John Gafford]

I'd stop for a second. How do you ascertain who's talented, who's not?

[Ryan Blair]

50% of every company is operating. I'm sorry, 100% of every company is operating at some number under 100% productivity. If they need a turnaround, they're probably at less than 50% productivity. So I'm going to get in there and I'm going to cut 50% of the staff out right away. Essentialize the business, prioritize it, and drive it as hard as I possibly can.

[John Gafford]

Are you looking for aptitude? Are you looking for attitude? Are you looking for is the right person, right seat, or some combination of the three?

[Ryan Blair]

I'm looking for work ethic. You know, first and foremost, most in a turnaround, we all need to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, you know, minimum. Right. So it's, you know, it's really turnaround. It's nine by nine by six, you know. And so who's willing to join me? Nine by nine by six? I'm willing to incent them to do this though. So I'm willing to pay overtime. I'm willing to carve them in on equity.

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

I'm willing to put bonuses on the table. But we got to be all hands on deck because we have to stop the bleeding. And that's what we're doing. Day one is we're stopping the bleeding. And it's going to take tough decisions. We're going to have to get rid of people we love, but we got to stop the bleeding. That's the first step that you do in a turnaround.

[John Gafford]

Okay, perfect. So we got our people squared away. Nice. I like that.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. People, programs, products. You know, you're cutting everything you possibly anything, doesn't matter.

[John Gafford]

You're looking at everything I'm looking at. You're cutting like crazy. You know, Elon Musk made that comment a couple of weeks ago. He said the reason that most companies fail is that they don't cut enough.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, when, when you're in the middle of a turnaround. The mistakes that I have made is that the entrenched people will fight to keep the resources to keep the team members to keep, you know, their spend high. People love spending money. No one loves saving money. Right. It's not fun to save money. It's fun to spend it. So you have to take it from a spend money culture to a save money culture. And not everybody's going to be along for the ride. So, you know, for example, there's a company that, you know, I've, I've been very close to that. Raised over $500 million. And they were a spend money culture. Now they have to turn into a save money culture. That is a very hard shift for a company to do.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, I think, you know, we made a shift in the last year with COO at one of our companies and he went and just cut everything without, without, without sacrificing any service to our employees or, or end use it. Just the company over years. You just. Why do we use that vendor? Because you just always have.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

When's the last time you priced this? We just haven't. And you start pricing everything in your business. And the amount of money he was able to put back in our pockets in that first six months was really incredible.

[Ryan Blair]

That's an exceptional operator. Most people are not brave enough and smart enough to make those tough decisions. We use a zero based budgeting method where we just look at what are a couple, you know, known factors in the business. Let's say we have 100 leads coming in. Okay. We have 100 leads. Now we need software for the leads. Okay, what do we need next? Well, we have to spend money to buy those leads. What do we need next? All right, we need somebody to call those leads. Right. What do we need next? So we start from one particular influx, whether it be on the revenue side or one. No. And we have x many customers to serve. And then you take a blank canvas and you just add back each expense one by one until you've essentialized the.

[John Gafford]

Business so that you're trimming the fat. That way you're saying, what's the bare minimum of we can do to maintain our level of service?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, and maintain the level of service. To your point, you know, if I.

[John Gafford]

Where the customer doesn't feel it.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. I have a thousand customers. So if you and I have a thousand customers, we have to serve. All right, we need. How many people do we need to serve those 1,000 customers. Great. We need 10 people to serve those 1,000 customers. We need one manager for those 10 people. Now you and I can run a business with one manager and 10 people. That's all we need in the software, of course, you know, to track and manage and run some analytics. And so, you know, essentializing it to the bare minimum. And then everything else that you keep should have an ROI attached to it. What is the return on investment of this expense or this employee that I'm keeping?

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

And then. And we have to drive that return on investment Per expense, per program, per product, per employee to make sure that we're actualizing the ROI that we've identified. Now, that's how we would go about the additional spend is that it should be roi, generative spend, outside of the essential spend.

[John Gafford]

I think, you know, most of a lot of the people listening to this show would be considered solopreneurs. I mean, they're not running scaled businesses. They're, they're everyday work. They're still hustling in the business. They haven't made that graduation to CEO yet. And I would say the hardest thing to do when you're doing that process in your own business is buying your own time. And I find that a lot of people struggle with that. Like, you know, yes, everybody says, oh, if, you know, if you don't have a good assistant, you are the assistant. And I understand that you can't get it out of your own way. But I also, I also see a lot of solopreneurs that I work with that tend to throw money away at dumb things in the name of time. Like what saves me time. Yeah, but does it that expense? Like, what is your time really worth at this? I think you may have overvalued your time.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

How do you have those conversations?

[Ryan Blair]

One, if it could be done in two minutes, do it now. Right? You know, a lot of times we're adding up a bunch of stuff on our list and we're, you know, we're creating a ton of tests. You only need three or four things per quarter to move the needle that are, you know, significant initiatives. So what I've learned is to really focus on just a few objectives per quarter, knock them out and then add to it. So if I get them done early than 90, earlier than 90 days, I might add three more. So three at a time, what are the things going to move? The needle. Everything else is nonsense. Right? So that's one, two is, you know, I don't like, I value my time at a high rate, so I tend to outsource everything that is not at that rate.

[John Gafford]

But you've earned the right to do that. There's so many people that are here, you know, they're early in that process. Not running a scaled business, not, you know, especially in real estate, which is what we do. So many people love to call themselves the CEO of their own little two man shop. Right? Like, dude, stop, stop. Right? If you're not answering to a handful of investors of your business, please stop calling yourself a CEO. You've earned that. Right.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, right. Well, But I would say that to those people, you have to master each process and you have. There's two things. You have to design the process, you have to run the process, and then you have to hand that process off to someone else. And so once you've designed the process and you've optimized it and it runs effectively and you've documented it, then you can hand it off to someone else.

[John Gafford]

That's the critical.

[Ryan Blair]

If I were starting a real estate firm and I know very little about it, you know, in terms of. Of. To the extent that you do, the first thing I would do is I would go knock on the doors or do whatever you told me to do. I would design the process, I'd optimize it, and I'd hire somebody to fill that role, and I'd move on to another process or another problem that I was looking to solve on my way to scaling the business one process at a time.

[John Gafford]

Because you're backfilling yourself. And I think what people don't do is what you just said. The key to what you just said was documenting. So many people do not. Like, if you walk, I can walk into just. I could walk out this front door, walk into six different businesses, and say, let me see your SOPs. And they would look at me like I was speaking Greek.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. Yeah. And documentation is easy. Easy. You know, get a Note file, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, and just have a simple documentation. And then you know it's a good process when you can hand it to someone else based on your documentation. And.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, well, dude, there's so, I mean, scribe. There's so many programs now that will help Notion. Notion that will help you build great SOPs. And if you don't, even if you don't want to go that route, just tell Chad gbt ask me a hundred questions about this process and help me build an sop.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

And watch what happens.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. There's a book called the E. Myth that Changed my Life early on in my Career by Michael Graham Gerber. I read it and I said, I. I have to, you know, learn how to properly document process. I learned that in the tech field. But the. And now. But I will tell you, very few people can both create a process and. And run one. It's rare. That's really the entrepreneur's job. Once I. I don't expect people to. I don't hire people to create, process and run them. I generally lead from the front. I create the process and then I bring someone else in to Run it. One mistake I see many entrepreneurs doing when they scale is they hire people to create and run process. And oftentimes you just don't get optimal.

[John Gafford]

Process built because they don't truly understand.

[Ryan Blair]

Your business and they don't understand the business. And it's a special talent for someone who can show up to no process whatsoever, no structure, no organization and create order out of chaos. That's a rare talent.

[John Gafford]

Well, I mean, just even sitting here with you now for 27 minutes, right. I've kind of got your personality packed pretty much.

[Ryan Blair]

You tell me.

[John Gafford]

You're very high d. Very high. You're very analytical thinker. You're very mathematically based. Everything you know, everything is in the math with you.

[Ryan Blair]

I'm a math, you're a math guy.

[John Gafford]

Everything's in the math. So what traits do you think? Obviously you've done it at extremely high level. So what traits do you think someone has to have to make them a very effective CEO?

[Ryan Blair]

Well, everyone has a different stack. And using a software term, you know, I've just built a stack, right. So you have your character and your competency and you have a stack of character traits and you have a stack of competencies that are necessary on the competency side. As you can tell, I'm a math guy, so I'm break this engineer.

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[Ryan Blair]

For you. I try to reverse engineer everything. But on the competency side, you know, you have to have sales, you have to have marketing, you have to have supply chain depending on the product. You have to have finance, you have to have technology. You might have to have international, you might have to have treasury. Like, you know, there's, there's a lot of competencies that you have to learn to scale a big business. Yeah. And those are skills. And you have to have the capacity to learn those skills. You have to have the desire to learn the skills. You have to have a life where you say And a belief that you believe you can learn any skill. Right. Which is on the character side. So beliefs is on the character side.

[John Gafford]

That's, that's, that's my, that's my bad habit. I sit here, watch somebody talk about business, and I'll go, I could do that.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, right. That's what you have. Belief.

[John Gafford]

Could spend that up in like a week. And you go to some black hole.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

And you're like, oh, God, what am I doing? What am I doing? Stop, stop. What are you doing? Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah, it's my toxic trait, if you will.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, I think I have that belief. But I also hire people that are, that are really brilliant at that particular area.

[John Gafford]

Quickly, that's my next question is do you try to. You overcompensate your own inadequacies or do you backfill with other people?

[Ryan Blair]

I get people very smart to teach me. So the, the best mentors that I've had are team members that I've hired from, you know, into my company. That new finance or that new software engineering. You know, these are the people that educated me. You know, I've had the privilege of serving alongside, you know, the former heads of major companies that I've been able to recruit into my company. And so that they educated me tremendously. So. And, you know, so I'm always. And I'm also interviewing people that are in roles constantly to gain intel. So if I, if I want to start a business, I'll hire. I'll interview the product manager for X company or Y company so I can better understand what they're doing and how they're doing it and then apply those best practices to what I'm building.

[John Gafford]

See, it's interesting because you just kind of answered both and what I just said, which is, you know, a. It's what's best for the business is to backfill with people to fill your inadequacies. Don't, don't try to just say, I can overcome and be everything, because nobody can be everything. But it's also advised to try to overcome by soaking up knowledge from the people that you backfill with.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. You have to get to a level where you're not incompetent. Yeah, if I'm incompetent, a level of competence. Yeah. If I'm incompetent on finances, you would not want to partner with me. So I have to have a degree of competency on this, which means I got to learn, I got to read books, I got to go to seminars I got to hire people until I increase my competency. But I'm never going to be the guy organizing every transaction and figuring out the FASB rules, you know, and the GAP rules and this, that and the other. For each and everything. I'm not going to figure out Sarbanes Oxley to every degree to go public. I have to hire people that know that, but I have to be competent enough to know, you know, how that stuff works and be able to speak finance with the finance people and lead those finance people to be effective and productive in finance.

[John Gafford]

For example, what makes, what makes a great leader? And folks, what makes you a great leader?

[Ryan Blair]

All the adversity that I've overcome. Yeah.

[John Gafford]

You know, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, we're coming up on our annual awards thing. This is the first time I'm gonna talk about this. We're coming up on our annual awards deal. And every year for we, you know, this is, this just so you know, I don't think you know anything about me a little bit. Really. A little bit. Right. So, yeah, this is the number one real estate brokerage in Vegas. We sell more homes than anybody else as far as volume.

[Ryan Blair]

And you said you have 300 something.

[John Gafford]

400, 585. Our biggest competitor has like 1500. So we're, we're battling out with. Somebody's got a thousand more foot soldiers than we do. We're still winning.

[Ryan Blair]

Good job.

[John Gafford]

Or close. We shouldn't be winning. I don't know if we'll still be winning by the time this comes out, but we normally, we normally we like to be second, which is good because it means I can still have quality people here. And it doesn't matter. But, you know, this year we do our little State of the Union. We hand our awards to everybody. And I always talk about the new tech we're going to add and the new stuff we're going to add and we're going to do this. And I had a situation happen, happen where recently we lost our family pet. We lost our dog. Had to put him down two hours before a party I was having at my house. So talking about a tough, tough night, having a, you know, literally, you know, we put him down and then 200 people show up. My house was interesting, but a week and a half later, we're sitting there and a box shows up at our house. And it's from chewy.com because my wife gets all the dog's meds and all the bus up in my, like, oh, God, I forgot to Cancel his stuff. And so she, you know, she calls him up and she goes, hey, you know, our dog passed away. Is there any way I can return this? And immediately got an email from our account rep, and he said, look, you know, go donate it to a shelter. We're immediately gonna, you know, immediately gonna refund you. And we're so sorry about Barclay. You know, it's never this heartfelt kind of email to my wife about how hard it was to lose pet. Five minutes later, she got another email from our old account rep. Oh, my gosh. I just heard about Barkley. That's so terrible. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. And my wife's like, look at this. Like, this is crazy. And I'm like, this is, like, the greatest customer service I've ever seen. I'm already thinking, I would never do anything with any pet company ever again other than Chewy. And then later that night, they send flowers to the house.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

Like, bro. So, you know, I thought about, as you get bigger and you scale and business and business and business, the thing that. That moves the needle the most with all of this, all of the things that we do here and all the effort and all of the customer service, it's those magic moments like that that make your company really part of the fabric of the community with not just your clients, but also your employees.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

So I tasked all of our people here. I said, dude, this is all we are doing this year.

[Ryan Blair]

I love it.

[John Gafford]

I'm not adding anything else. I'm not adding anything else. Every single person that works for me in management or whatever else, they are tasked now with finding a magic moment for one of our people every week. Every. I don't care. And we're going to compete every week. And I want to hear what they were, and I want to hear what we did, and it just has to be something that we did for some of our people. People every week. Every single. In all of our companies. And that's all I'm focused on. And I think it's. It's so hard when you think the way that both. Because I'm very. I'm very. The truth is in the math. I say that every time somebody asks me a question. That's my. That's my standard answer. Well, the truth's in the math. I need to look at the math. That's my standard answer.

[Ryan Blair]

I like that.

[John Gafford]

And it's so hard when you think that way that you get away from some of that stuff. So what do you do to instill that type of culture? And I Obviously you do with the success.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

What do you do to install that?

[Ryan Blair]

We've had programs like that. And in fact, I own a health dog food company, I'm an owner in it that does similar things that you just described. So there, there, that, that math adds up. When you, when you create connection with people, you know it and, and you create a relationship with people, that adds up. I, I had a good friend and that was Vegas based, named Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who's no longer with us. And he did things like that too. And he was a highly analytical, brilliant Harvard guy. And you know, and he pioneered a lot of those things. Yeah.

[John Gafford]

His book, the Zap, the Zappos book.

[Ryan Blair]

Was phenomenal at delivering happiness. He would deliver flowers and you know, he, he taught me a lot about that subject. And this was one of the smartest entrepreneurs I had known. And so I've implemented a lot of those programs because they add up. The math adds up to it. There's, you're creating belief in people. What, what is belief worth? If people are filled with belief, they will do anything for you. Right. If they have no belief, they will do nothing for you. So we need to constantly fill that belief tank in people. And then with regard to customers knowing that you care, every other company out there doesn't care. So when they, your customers know that you care, that's what your competitive advantage is, that you have empathy. Right. So all these other companies don't care. You care. That's your, that's your winning formula.

[John Gafford]

We're going to care more. Yeah, that's, that's, that is our objective amongst all of our brands this year is we're going to care more than anybody else does.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. And that's an evolution that you've come to based on the fact that, you know, you've gotten to the level that you're at. And now you know this is going to separate you from the package. But in order to get to where you were, you first had to be ruthless with the numbers. You had to, you know, you had to process everything, analyze everything, do everything in a very numbers driven way. And then now you're at this place where the machine is working and now you can add gasoline to the fire in ways that you couldn't before. So you can't do that day one, you know, to the same degree that you can today.

[John Gafford]

Well, I think too, I think if you're going to be a very effective CEO, you got to love what you do every day. And there's A lot of days in those number days that you're just like, another day, another day, another dollar, just, you know, looking at P. Ls, looking at balance sheets, looking at this, looking at that, and it's just. It's just another day.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. You. I. I have a technique that I utilize where I. I look for love in every meeting.

[John Gafford]

Oh, I love that.

[Ryan Blair]

So, like, you know, I'm. If I. If I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be work, right? There's going to be hard, or this is gonna. This is gonna be a long day, I go, Okay, I have 16 opportunities to find love today. In these meetings, I have 16 opportunities to connect to a human being. Today's not going to be a hard day. Today's going to be a day that tests my endurance. So I'm turning it around every moment to try to optimize for happiness and to optimize to have fun as I'm working. And so that's the technique that I've utilized as opposed to saying it's going to be rough. I got to talk to 10 people today that I have this. I say, oh, no. I have an opportunity to. To find love in 10 meetings today. And I'm on a scavenger hunt in each of those meetings, trying to find it. To find it, Right?

[John Gafford]

Yeah. I try to look at everything as I get to do it.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

Like, I get. I get to it as. As you probably can attest to this, we are gentlemen of a certain age. When you reach a certain age, your friends start to die.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

When they start to die, it's like. And there's no candlelight vigil for them around the lake. It's just like, yeah, that dude didn't really eat that good and take care of himself. And. And unfortunately, I just lost my seventh. What I would consider at one point of my life, either a best friend or in that. That tight circle of three, I just lost my seventh one. So I said I was going to honor those guys. So I actually went and got my Memento mori dog tags with all their initials on the back of it. And every time something comes up that I don't want to do, I'm like, these dudes would give anything to be doing.

[Ryan Blair]

I love it.

[John Gafford]

Anything to be doing this right now. So, yeah, finding that. Why. And so many people have to do things. I don't have to do anything. I get to do everything. I do.

[Ryan Blair]

You. That's beautiful. I'm gonna. I'm gonna use it. I also have had lots of friends Go. And I pay tribute to my mentors that are no longer with us. Tony Shea being one of them. John Wooden, the UCLA famed coach. So I'm often thinking about the stoler, the shoulders that I stand upon and the great ones that have poured into me that are no longer with us and dear friends as well. So I love that I, I think I'm going to get something engraved on their, in their honor.

[John Gafford]

I love that.

[Ryan Blair]

Best practice.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, do. Dude, let me ask you this because you're coming from like, not weed for snakes. Weird trade, by the way, but you're trading weed for snakes and you're in a room with like John Wooden and all these guys you just mentioned. So was there ever a time in your life when you suffered through imposter syndrome? Or was that, do you, have you always had this innate level of confidence in yourself? Either answer is fair.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, you know, I, in retrospect, I, I was an imposter. I just didn't know it.

[John Gafford]

Ignorance is bliss sometimes, kids.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. So looking back, like that guy that showed up to that room to raise money from PCs, I'm like, I can't believe he did that. Yeah. You know, you know, but, but I didn't, I didn't walk and you know, I, I, it was a mission. But I think because I was a fighter and I was, you know, I was a tough kid growing up. I had some, I had a thought in my head that I could beat these guys in pretty much every sport, I could beat these guys in a fight. I could beat these guys in 9 out of 10 things. Maybe not in finance, maybe not in business, but I'm going to learn everything I can from them in those subjects. So I showed up very aggressive. You know, I was intense. I, I was there to get the information out of them, to extract what I possibly could so that I could achieve my objectives.

[John Gafford]

Just unapologetic about it.

[Ryan Blair]

Unapologetic like, you know, because I showed up to a person, it's like I sized the person up and I'd say, you know, if we were in a street fight, you would not, you know, be disrespecting me right now. So I'm, I'm showing up to you with respect. I want the information that you have. I need the help that you have. But I was man to man in those meetings. I wasn't afraid of those people.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, love that. No, that's good. I want to talk a little bit now because obviously, you know, you run now your faith based entrepreneurial coaching. Yeah, you run that so let's talk a little bit about your faith because obviously it's very important to you. At what point did you find that?

[Ryan Blair]

So I, I was raised by a grandmother that was very faith driven. She taught me the, the foundational values. But when my family got addicted to drugs, I strayed from it. I also was partying and living like a rock star. Then when I started making tens of millions a year, I was really living like a rock star, you know, decadent life. I got completely away from it. Then my mom died. And as she was dying, I made a commitment to her. I confessed to her. You know, she died tragically. She fell down a flight of stairs. She was in a coma for two years. I couldn't see her all the time and I was partying like a rock star. And so sometimes I wouldn't go see her. And I was out partying in Vegas and doing, you know, crazy stuff. And I felt bad about that, I. Guilt about that. And so as she was dying, I told her, the reason why, you know, I haven't been able to see you is because I've been living this, this double life. I'm not the son you think I am. And on the other side, you know, you're going to see everything and I'm going to be, I'm gonna, I'm gonna change, I'm gonna honor you. I'm gonna do things differently. And that then broke me wide open. When she passed away, I broke, hit the rock bottom of all rock bottoms from an emotional and mental and spiritual level. Took two years off of work, went and rebuilt myself, prayed, meditated every day non stop until I was ready to go back out there and reenter the, you know, the, the world of entrepreneurship. And I did so through mentorship. I decided day one, I was just going to start mentoring people and have a good business idea. I was pretty weak coming out of the cave, so to speak. And I said, you know, I'm just going to mentor people and see where that takes me.

[John Gafford]

Let's see what happens.

[Ryan Blair]

And now I'm building an AI tech platform and doing autonomous coaching and deploying software in many different companies. And I have a movement of coaches that are serving companies all around the world right now.

[John Gafford]

How important? So when you say, look, obviously faith based is God belief, we get that, but are there elements of purpose driven this, there's giving back into the community for this stuff? I mean, is there elements, moments of that involved in these.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, I, I only want to work with people that I like at this stage of my life, you know, if I don't like you, if we don't have a. If I, we don't have a shared sense of humor, if I don't have. If I don't admire the entrepreneur. Too short, right? I just, I don't want to take calls from people on a Sunday that I don't believe in and care about and want to help. Like, I have to feel a noble duty to serve this human being and that I know in my way of giving them what I know and helping them through whatever problems they're up against, whether personally or professionally, they're going to talk tithe more, they're going to give back more, they're going to do good in the world, and I get to participate in the legacy that they create, directly or indirectly. I'm not trying to make money on, you know, to. I'm not trying to optimize for money at this stage of my life. Trying to optimize for, you know, the good that I can create. And knowing that I'm helping a young man like I just did this morning.

[John Gafford]

That'S got, you know, feeling drained, foggy.

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[Ryan Blair]

And he's serving a bunch of individuals. And I help him with just a small practice that is going to help him in the season. And he's a young CEO and I told him, look, if I were in your situation, I go do this. He goes and does it. He gets results. He moves on to the next challenge. It's life giving to me. It doesn't take anything from me. It actually fuels me up. It makes me excited about my life because I can serve.

[John Gafford]

Let me ask you this, so maybe, maybe you are. I'm not right? There are, there are, there are days when I'm just off, right? When I'm just like, man, I'm just not at a place to, like, I pray my phone doesn't ring today. Like, I mean, we have a lot of people that work for us and I'm just like, please tell anybody, call me today, because I don't want to snap at somebody and I want to be like, why did you just figure this out? Why are you calling me like, there are days, not a lot of them. I mean, I'm pretty, pretty even keel, but I have those days, man. So how do you get up to serve for others when you just don't feel like getting up at all?

[Ryan Blair]

We all have those days. So, you know, anybody who says they don't have those days, it's a myth, right? You look at the Tony Robbins and people like that that we, I love and adore, they have those days too. I know them personally. Everybody has them. It's being able to recognize that you're having that day. I like to look at it as an input output ratio. If, if I'm. If I'm drained, I need to put more into me. That means, I mean, I need to spend more time in nature with family or I need to optimize around my health and my well being that I'm putting too much out. Out is action. So I'm looking at input output ratios every day. And if I'm drained, today's an input day day. If I'm, if I'm, you know, inspired and I'm ready, today's an output day. And every day I'm looking at my input output ratio. How much am I putting in the tank versus how much am I taking out? And then when I don't have any more to give at the end of a day and I'm exhausted, well, I know I haven't optimized my input output ratio correctly. So during the day I'm putting things in the tank. Might be a quick meditation. I might go do a boxing lesson. You know, things like that that are going to fuel me up.

[John Gafford]

Are you a TM guy? Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I love it.

[Ryan Blair]

So, you know, so if, but if I miss my midday meditation, I'm going to be cranky, I'm going to be triggered. And if I'm triggered, that's an indicator as to where I need to do the work and where I need to do the optimization. I get triggered all the time. I get frustrated all the time. You know, my team feels that I feel bad about that when that happens. And I just take responsibility for it and say, I still got work to do, let me go back and do some work and I'll come back, you know, refreshed and energized. But sleep is everything. And I've learned. I found a device that changed my life. I'm not affiliated with it. It's not a Pl for anything that I own. It's called the Poeto. You put it on your neck.

[John Gafford]

The Poulsetto.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. It stimulates your vagus nerve. And I sleep like a baby. It's like 300 bucks.

[John Gafford]

The pulsetto.

[Ryan Blair]

Pulsetto. And I have no affiliation with this company.

[John Gafford]

Really.

[Ryan Blair]

I was sleeping like four or five hours a night. Now I'm sleeping eight hours a night on this thing.

[John Gafford]

Really?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. No. No medication. No sleeping pills.

[John Gafford]

I track my sleep. We were talking about biohacking before. I track my. I mean, I track everything.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, it just. You put it on your device 10 minutes before sleep. It's. There's a sleep program on it. It like sends electric shock waves into your vagus nerve. And I sleep like a baby because of it.

[John Gafford]

Dude, I'm in.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. Yeah, because like 300 bucks.

[John Gafford]

Yeah. I do the. I do the ground. Like I try to get off the blue screens two hours before I get on the grounding mat. I'll run it down to about 8 megahertz. So it's that low megahertz kind of chill you out. And it's been, you know, it's a good. But I was going to actually, my next one was going to be the eight sleep because a buddy of mine just said that thing is.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, that's my next one too.

[John Gafford]

He said it's just magical. This thing is magic. But I'm going to try that. Which is. And it's so interesting that you were talking about the input, output, you know, variables for yourself because I always talk about. I look at marriage that way. People ask me like, what's secret of good marriage? I'm like, dude, it's like a bank account. You make deposits, withdrawals. And you better not ever be overdrawing your wife. That's. That's how you do it. You know, sometimes you. You know, why does your wife let you stay out after the fight till late sometimes when. When you're with the boys? It's because I show up for her all the time. And so I always make way more deposits, withdrawals. But it's interesting, I never thought about that with myself. Like, am I feed myself enough of what I need.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. One. One of the things I do. By the way, I'm a newlywed, so I'm taking.

[John Gafford]

Congratulations.

[Ryan Blair]

I'm taking your advice on that's it. The deposit withdrawals, marriage. One of the things I do is I write up a list of all of the activities that. That give me life. The sunset, the sunrise, watering the plants, walking the dog. And I have that long list of activities. And in the event that I have a gap or I'm a little exhausted or I get triggered, I just go do one of them. Some are less time than others, so I might pick one that's more optimized for whatever the window is. You know, I got a speed bag in my house. It gives me joy. I get into a flow state. I hit that thing for 10, 15 minutes, and then I'm pumped. I got a little trampoline that I'll go bounce up and down on. You know, I'll go dance on the thing, play some good music. And it's just a way to get my state shifting and to put something in to shift that, you know, frustration, energy or that negative energy.

[John Gafford]

Dude, what a great exercise. Like, you should have a note in your Apple notes that says like. Like what? Like all of. Just a list. All those things you can do quick. How long they. How long they take so you don't have to think about it. When you hit that spot, you're just like, Yeah, I got 20 minutes.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, just pick. Draw one scrap. Draw one from a hat real quick. The other thing, though, if you want to shift the energy into, there's two things you can do is one you pour into. The other is you pour out to someone else. Tithe. Give to a friend. Do something good. Anonymous. Don't take credit for it. Try to help a friend, and they don't even know you're trying to help them. So, you know, take on a project where you do some good. That will shift energy heading in your direction as well.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, I, you know, know, it's so. It's so hard to balance out the social media aspect of everybody's got to do everything you do and let me go give to the homeless. I was like, well, I just want other people to be inspired by what I'm doing. Yeah, I agree. It's better if you leave the camera off.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

You know, I think there's only one thing we do all year where we turn the cameras on. It's when we go pay off the layaways for Christmas. That's like the only thing that. That we ever say, this is what we're doing because we want more people to come next year. Right.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. You should be doing things in secret.

[John Gafford]

Yes.

[Ryan Blair]

As well as things public.

[John Gafford]

That's why they call it Secret Santa. Yeah, it's the public Santa. Secret Santa.

[Ryan Blair]

The greatest. The most pure gift that we can give is one where we have no intention of anything in return whatsoever. So I don't want it on social. That's the most pure gift. But it's okay if we're. We're giving with some intention. There's nothing wrong with that. We just want to be public about that, you know, yes, I have an intention. I want to drive traffic to my firm for these gifts because I believe every firm should do that. Nothing wrong with that. We want to give with pure intention, and we don't want to be honest about the intention that we're giving the gift with.

[John Gafford]

What's your fit? Because obviously, we're not publicizing. I'm just curious what your favorite thing is. You do. Do you have one little thing that do consistently that is your favorite thing to do? Just giving.

[Ryan Blair]

I like to involve people in the conspiracy of giving, and they don't know it. So I might tell you, hey, you know, let's give a gift to someone that we both mutually know, let's say. And then I ask you, hey, I'll send you a hundred bucks. You give it to them. They don't know that I've given it to them. You are now involved in the gift. I'm involved in the gift. So we're unlocking multiple blessings. So it's a conspiracy of giving, and they have no idea that I. That I was, you know, the person that was a catalyst there. So I say to you, don't tell them, them, you know, that I'm involved. I'll send you 100 bucks, you give it to them. You say, okay, let's do it. And then you involve me in a conspiracy to give. And so together, we're conspiring to give more, and we're. We're, you know, involving multiple people in the gift. I do it with my son all the time.

[John Gafford]

I love. That's great, dude. It's so important to teach the kids that stuff, you know? Probably my favorite thing I do all year is around Christmas for the 23 days of. Or 20, 24 days. Sometimes I. Sometimes we get the 24th. Depends how busy we are. But it's always the 23 days every day. Hey, we'll give away 100 bucks.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

Just randomly. Yeah, just randomly. Just. And I do. I always want to do it with my kids as much as possible, just so they can just see just here, you know, which is great. I love doing that.

[Ryan Blair]

A leader like yourself, by the way, there's somebody that needs you. You could call up and just pour life into you. Call up and not on your team. No, that's different. There's people outside Your team that, you know in the industry, you could just call up and say, hey, I just want to tell you I think what you're doing is great and just keep at it. It that will shift the energy because we give to our team all the time. But when we take time to give outside of our team, that also shifts the energy heading in our direction.

[John Gafford]

Well, it's so funny, I had something happened the other day that's never happened unless I was speaking somewhere and obviously in an obvious place. Right. Because then people always come up and talk to you after. But I bought kind of an audacious car. And I'll say it's audacious, but I've always wanted the car. So I bought the car. I can afford the car. Bought the damn car. Right. And it's. For me, it's not before anyone else. But there's a benefit to the car because it's now happened twice. I've had two younger age kids, young adults, kids, whatever, blah, blah, come up to me and ask me, what do you do? Yeah. And how do I do? Like, what advice would you give for.

[Ryan Blair]

Me at your age? You can do that.

[John Gafford]

I love that.

[Ryan Blair]

I don't recommend. A lot of young people will do that and they'll buy the Lambo because.

[John Gafford]

No, no, no, it's dumb.

[Ryan Blair]

And. Well, they'll buy it because they try to justify it. That's going to be a lead engine, generally speaking. You're not going to pay for the Lambo through leads.

[John Gafford]

No, you're not. No, I, I am. I am saying I appreciate this car allows me to give back, not because it's generating me anything different.

[Ryan Blair]

I used to have a classic car that people wanted to take pictures with and, and it was always a privilege. Like people would just say, it's a life dream of mine to take a picture with this car. And I'd say, please, get in it, get in it.

[John Gafford]

Do it. Do your thing.

[Ryan Blair]

So I agree. You know, and it's important for us to share in our wealth in different ways. And so congratulations that you're doing that.

[John Gafford]

I love that. Honestly, it's my favorite part of the. I love the car, but it's my favorite part of it so far. Is that.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, that's awesome.

[John Gafford]

Because, because it just. You don't. I mean, I'm just, I'm at, I'm at the sandwich place.

[Ryan Blair]

Right.

[John Gafford]

And it happens there.

[Ryan Blair]

Well. And it's an inspiration.

[John Gafford]

It's great.

[Ryan Blair]

And it's good to share that inspiration. And you know, I've had a lot of rock star moments. Right. And I'm very careful now, and I measure my intention very close, closely. But I like nice things as well. And, and I like to share those nice things with others.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, no, I, I dig that. What advice would you give if somebody was that 18 to 24 year old, struggling, trying to figure it out, what advice would you give them?

[Ryan Blair]

Get a mentor. Pursue multiple mentors. Keep going until you find somebody. Extract information from every individual and acquire skills. Your day, your life is about skills. Skills pay the bills. So acquire skills at all costs.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, and I'm gonna, I'll say this about that too, right? Because I had somebody say to me not too long ago, that works for me. And the kid said, he's a great kid, he's doing a great job. And he said to me, he goes, well, you know, I don't know if you know this or not, but you're my mentor. That's what he said. And I gotta tell you, if you want somebody to take an interest in you, I don't know how you can hear that is. It is a. Someone that has achieved relative success and not feel an instant responsibility. Because whole man, I felt this instant responsibility for this kid's success in a different way than I did just because he works for us.

[Ryan Blair]

Right.

[John Gafford]

I was immediately like, oh my. Like, I gotta make sure this kid wins.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

If I miss mentor now, I'm responsible for what happens to him.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah. Being a mentor isn't. It's an, It's a role. Yeah. It's an assignment. There's something spiritual there. And whether you're spiritual or not, there's something there. It's. Yeah, it's a part of our tradition and humanity and in teaching and passing on to the next generation. So it's hard, hardwired into our DNA to mentor. So when that child, that young man, invoked mentorship and you. And told you that you had that coveted role in his life, that then activated you at a new level in your relationship. So that it's important for us to carry the mentorship tradition on and to be good mentors to people.

[John Gafford]

But I think the reason I said that was to. Is to young people listening. Like, I mean, look, it's kind of like, it's kind of like a sign of the girlfriend, boyfriend label maybe a little bit. Don't be. Not on the first date. Don't be, don't be, don't be too aggressive with it. But once somebody's helped you a little bit, feel free to tell them, hey, man, just so you Know you're my mentor or hey, ma'am, whatever it is, you're my mentor, whatever it is. And I think you're get the response that you're going to get from that person is, man, it was, it was a lot. It was, it was like, whoa, it.

[Ryan Blair]

Has to be authentic.

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

And it was, yeah, it has to be authentic. And you, the, the first job when you're pursuing a mentor is figure out what you can give to them. Right. He was giving to you. He's giving you his time, his energy, his desire to help build your firm. Right. So there's, there's an economic connection action there. Most of the time we don't figure out what to give to the mentor first. So I was always saying, what can I do for you? Can I donate to your charity? Can I donate time to your charity? If I don't have money to donate to your charity, how can I serve you? First and foremost, because I know what you're going to give me. Yeah, I, I understand clearly what I want from you, so I don't understand clearly what I can give to you. So help me clean up your yard, your garage. What do you want me to talk to your son? What can I do for you?

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

And then once I get that, you know, that, that, that relationship established, that it's going to be reciprocal, then we have a mentorship relationship. It has to be reciprocal. He's giving to you.

[John Gafford]

But I think it's, I think it, to a certain extent, though, if, if somebody shows me enough gumption, the fact that they just want to learn, and then they're, and then you can't be an asshole. Anytime somebody's an asshole with me, I'm out. Right. If you start, what should I do? And I tell them, and they do the polar opposite. I'm like, okay, you don't need me.

[Ryan Blair]

Well, they have to want to learn. They have to take action on what you taught them, and then they have to at least give you some gratitude in the process. Process, Right. So what you receive back is gratitude, and that gives you fuel, right?

[John Gafford]

Yeah. When somebody pulls sometimes, that's enough for me.

[Ryan Blair]

That, that, that's enough. Hey, if somebody gives me gratitude, that adds to my life, that gives me good energy. I feel that I'm thankful for that, you know, But I, I, There's a, there's a concept spiritually called bread of shame. We don't, we want people to know how they can earn your time. So I will make people, they say, I want you to mentor me. I'll say, I need some help in my garden. Right. I do, you know, show up.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, you always need some help.

[Ryan Blair]

I need some help. I'm like, show up. I need some help. Why? Because I'll resent you if I don't feel like you are showing up to contribute now. What. What? You know, what can you give me? You can't give me money. You can't. You know, if. If you're. If you're broke, you want to help me, help me with my trash. Help me with my garden. Help me with organizing my.

[John Gafford]

Give me time back.

[Ryan Blair]

And then. And then I'll give you $10,000 worth of my time, which is an hour. Yeah, right. So just, you know, give me a couple hundred dollars worth of your time. Time, and I'll give you 10 of mine and I'll be happy with that trade.

[John Gafford]

Well, dude, that is a trade that anybody should be willing to make.

[Ryan Blair]

Oftentimes people won't, though. They ask, they ask, they ask, and they're not willing to give in return.

[John Gafford]

That's the question. It's like, would you. Okay. Would you work in somebody's garden for $10,000 an hour?

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah.

[John Gafford]

Yeah. Okay, great. Well, this dude's gonna give you $10,000 worth of knowledge. Go help and pull some weeds.

[Ryan Blair]

Yeah, yeah. That's the litmus test that I have for people that want my help. I have a. I have a property.

[John Gafford]

That's Mr. Miyagi stuff right there.

[Ryan Blair]

I have a property in northern Arizona and. And off the grid, 80 acres.

[John Gafford]

Yeah.

[Ryan Blair]

And I got work to do there at all times. So if somebody wants my mentorship, I. I'll put you work up there.

[John Gafford]

Yeah, let's go work up there. All right. Well, dude, Ryan, thank you so much for coming, but I want to keep you on schedule. I know you got a flight.

[Ryan Blair]

Thank you.

[John Gafford]

If they want to find you, how.

[Ryan Blair]

Do they find you on Instagram? I'm at Real Ryan Blair. Or you can go to altercall.com A L T R C A L L C O M. Cool, brother.

[John Gafford]

It was good to have you through. You're welcome back anytime you want to come back and we'll see you again. I mean, look, I think if you listen to this today, as with so many of the high level people we come through, the key to your future success normally lies on the other side of your ability to, number one, ask for help, but number two, be worthy of it. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it. Or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift. Com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review, give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.