Matt Ryder left the army after a soldier's call about his newborn made him realize military life was finite. In fitness sales, he hated the work until he helped an overweight client refuse to quit, discovering persuasion could transform lives and build his business. That shift led him to become a $40M/year CEO.
And I was on operations in Afghanistan. We were in the middle of the desert, and one of the guys who'd been in for a long time, he was on a sat phone to his wife while she was having his first kid. So it was that date that I kind of knew that my time in this regiment was limited, and that's kind of when I started to make plans to really sort of exit. I didn't really have a plan. It took me kind of 2 years to figure out and really get the confidence to leave. So how did I get started in sales? I was in the fitness industry. I was put in a situation where I was kind of forced to learn how to do something that I really hated to do, which was selling. I wasn't good at it. I wasn't really confident in it. And I had a breakthrough one day when I was— had a young lady and she was about probably 30, 40 kilos overweight, and I didn't let her give up on herself. That's kind of when I had the realization that if I could get the noises that come out of my face to convince people to do things that are within their best interest, then I can not only grow my business, help my family, but also help them in the process. So I was like, well, I might as well kind of go down the line of doing sales.
