Conscious Leadership: The Secret to Transform Your Business and Succeed with Ryan Blair

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Scale Up Method, where we teach you how to reach the next level in business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. Too many business owners are stuck trying to do everything themselves, and their businesses are suffering as a result. And I don't want you to be one of those people. I am Alison Maslin, and my company, Pinnacle Global Network, has helped thousands of business owners scale their companies using my framework, the Scale it method. All business owners face similar challenges when it comes to growth. So on this podcast, we're delivering the tactics you need to finally reach that next level in business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. Today I'm very excited. I'm talking to Ryan Blair, who is a serial entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and best selling author. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Alter Call, a coaching platform that teaches leaders how to elevate their minds, their bodies and their souls in order to live a meaningful life. That sounds so good. He is the former CEO of Vesalis and it's a global, healthy lifestyle company. Ryan brought Visalas out of debt, helped it to survive the 2008 recession, and sold it for over 7,700 million dollars. And we want to know how the heck he did that. Ryan was named ERNST and Young 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year and also won the DSN Global Turnaround Award in 2010. And I wanted to bring Ryan on the show because his emphasis is on conscious leadership, which creates a culture of motivation and which really is the foundation for scaling any company. Conscious leadership and conscious business revolve around aligning yourself with your mission and feeling fulfilled with the work that you're doing. And when everyone in the company is aligned and everyone's in the mindset of growing and scaling, then you know you have a powerful energy behind you. So I'm excited to talk to Ryan about how to implement conscious leadership into our company, into your company. So welcome, Ryan. Thank you so much for being on the Scale it method podcast.

Thank you for having me, Allison. It's a pleasure.

Yeah. So you know, our show focuses on how to scale companies beyond eight figures, which you have done yourself. You walk the talk and you successfully built and sold six multi million dollar companies by the time you were 30. Oh, my God. And prior to becoming an entrepreneur, you were living a completely different life. Can you tell us about, you know, what you were doing in your earlier life, what it was like growing up for you?

Well, yeah, I started in the middle class. My dad was an engineer, my mother was a homemaker. Then my dad got addicted to drugs, my mother to alcohol. And I lost both of them at a young age. So about 11 years old, my middle class environment started to disintegrate. By the time I was 13, I was living on the streets. I was living in a converted turkey coop, a small shack in the back of an impoverished neighborhood. There was a lot of gang violence and next thing you know, I got caught up with the wrong group of friends and I got jumped into a gang, forced into it rather, and then started doing illegal entrepreneurship. So I went from the middle class to poverty and then by the grace of God, I'm very spiritual. My mother introduced me to a man who later became my mentor and he was an entrepreneur and he lived in the wealthy class. And so when I saw the way the wealthy lived and I heard about this thing called entrepreneurship, you know, it was so exciting to me because I wasn't going to be a, a doctor or a lawyer or any of the other professions that the counselors in school tried to direct me toward because I had already dropped out of school my freshman year. I thought I'd never go to college. I had no hope for the future whatsoever and the education system had completely failed me. So when he told me about entrepreneurship and told me I didn't need a college degree, I didn't need to be good in school, but I could learn some skills like sales and marketing and a variety of other skills and I could be rich, I was like, well, why didn't my teachers tell me about that path? So I became an entrepreneur at about 19 years old and I'm now turning 45. So I've been at this for good, 25 plus years.

Yeah. Wow, that is an incredible story. You obviously turned your life around and you know, wow, that is. You had an angel, right? You had an angel drop into your life that was introduced to you by your mom. And so that truly was a blessing. And you can see the possibilities and yeah, why this isn't taught in school, I have no idea. Maybe that's crazy change moving forward.

I have a 13 year old boy and the other day we were talking to him as he's transitioning to the next. He's going into middle school. And they were talking about different career choices he has. And I said, well, his father is an entrepreneur, he's going to start a company. And everyone in the room, the principal and the teachers and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. And the school system has no entrepreneurial concept whatsoever. It actually trains our children away from being entrepreneurs and takes away their entrepreneurial spirit, basically. So I'm a huge advocate of teaching the subject of entrepreneurship even at a young age.

Yeah, I agree. I started my business at 19, too, although I'm a little bit older than you, and raised my daughter as a single mom, and she really was by my side through building these businesses and therefore has her own now, too. So I think it's great that you're doing that for your son, because our kids do what we do. Right. And so. Or the opposite of what we do in your case, with your parents. So let's go back there for just a moment longer because, you know, you've said on different occasions, and I've listened to some of your other interviews, read amazing things that you've done that you learned a lot about business while you were in a gang. Can you share any of those defining moments and lessons that you've carried with you from that?

Yeah, well, a gang is simply an illegal organization, and there's a hierarchy to it. There's reporting structure, there's economic, you know, initiatives. Right. There's things that people are doing to make money. And there's a lot of fundamentals that you can learn in poverty that they don't teach you in business class whatsoever. In fact, poverty is a much more entrepreneurial environment than the business, than the middle classes. And so, you know, I learned leadership, I learned survival skills. And as a result of the challenges that I faced, when I faced entrepreneurial challenges, they paled in comparison because I'd already built some character and built some strength. And so when I was facing the hardship of, say, the 2008 recession, I could lean on the fact that I'd already overcome some pretty difficult hardship. So a lot of the mindset and, you know, some fundamentals, some leadership fundamentals as well. Now, there's a lot of things that when you're in a gang that are not applicable. But being in a gang is very hard. You are worried about getting killed. You're worried about being betrayed by your, you know, your. Your fellow gang members. You're worried about getting arrested and going to prison. So you're really worried all the time about your survival. And all of your economic activity comes with a lot of consequences. And when I looked at traditional entrepreneurship or legal entrepreneurship, I was like, are you kidding me? I can make millions of dollars and not have to worry about going to jail, getting killed, getting betrayed. You know, this seems too easy, right?

So when business owners are. They're having a stressful day, you're like, you have no idea. Right? So, yeah, you Might worried about losing an account or an employee, but not dying.

Yeah. You know, I've learned to embrace the challenges of business, and I think that if we allow ourselves to worry about them, you know, we often suffer from suffering, and so we might lose an account, and then we suffer even more than we should. Yes. You know, it hits us hard, and we should learn that, you know, learn a lesson from it and make some adjustments. But I think we, as entrepreneurs suffer from suffering too much. And so one of the techniques that I utilize is I try to celebrate the challenges, and, you know, it's an opportunity for growth. And every time that you learn a lesson from a challenge and you apply what you've learned and you build, you know, foundation around that or you improve process or infrastructure, you know, each challenge basically fortifies the foundation of what you're building, so you should actually be grateful for the ones that come as opposed to suffering and then suffering from the suffering, which is what we tend to do as entrepreneurs.

Hmm. Yeah. That's so powerful. And it's true. When the challenges come, it forces us to be creative and figure out a way to prevent it from happening next time or just a totally better solution altogether that often ends up taking your business to a whole other level, you know.

Yeah. They're designed to humble you as well. And entrepreneurship is one of the most humbling things that you can possibly do as a career. You're going to have customers tell you you're terrible. You're going to have team members tell you you suck. You're gonna have people say that your vision's terrible. You're gonna have family members that try to talk you out of what you're up to. You're gonna have competition, you know, breathing down your neck. It's the most humbling exercise that we could possibly engage in in terms of profession. And so there's a lot of opportunity for us to utilize these vehicles to grow character and grow our consciousness, because every single day, we're going to have things that come our way. They're going to test who we are, and we have an opportunity to grow with each of those things.

Yeah. So, so powerful, Ryan. Now, let's fast forward and talk about Visalis, the healthy lifestyle company that used to run. You took that company from 6 million in debt to 150 million in 16 months. How did you take that to scale so quickly?

There was a number of things that happened. One was the 2008. So we had sold to a publicly traded company in 2008. We signed it on 8-42008 and literally like the next day, the entire economy fell apart. The housing bubble burst. You know, you had Lehman Brothers meltdown in September of that year. And so the whole, you know, our timing was impeccable and you know, very lucky. Now the publicly traded company infused some cash. The founders were able to take some cash off the table and they bought the business with a multi year earn out because the business was in the luxury business of selling vitamins at the time. Our sales went from two and a half million a month down to 600,000amonth. And then we went into debt and the whole thing fell apart. The publicly traded company wrote us off and basically walked away. And we as co founders had to put basically all the money that we received from the publicly traded company, most of it anyways, back into the business to keep it alive and to keep the earn out going, which we.