The Brutal Truth About Scaling to $100M I | Ryan Blair

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I believe that I'm going to advance the kingdom of God one degree a day by way of what I share. What are your thoughts on that? Are there any consequences to a business for showcasing that as part of their brand? There are some consequences, of course, but the reason why they don't share it is because they don't have the skill to.
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You will not be successful in modern society if you don't master the skills of creating content, period. So many people I see never get past the $1 million mark because they're treating their company like a job. I had a $65 million a month. I believe that I was worthy of $65 million that month. I believe I was worthy of $100 million. It's much more fun running a $100 million company than it is running a $10 million company. $10 million, you might be making a little bit of money. You got a whole lot of problems at $10 million. At $100 million...
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You have great, competent executives. You get to do meaningful work. You get to be in awe of the brilliance that you're surrounded by. What makes you really believe there is a God? Ryan, how much money do you make?
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depending on the day of the month. Some days a lot, some days a little. And all the money I make though, I really don't make it. My faith requires me to be the steward of the money that I bring in and it's God's money. So I just deploy it. I love that. I love the framing. And it's reported that you've done over 2 billion in total career sales, more than 1 billion in cumulative exits across companies that you've been a part of.
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And so what do you do today in terms of business and your focus and how you make impact? Today, I mentor entrepreneurs that are building and scaling their businesses in a variety of different industries, parlaying what I've learned by way of the great mentors that have worked with me, the great investors that I've had the privilege of serving alongside, and teaching them from my experience and just working directly with them to help them build and scale their businesses and make the right decisions so that way they can achieve their objectives personally and professionally.
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Incredible. So the goal of every Insider Sessions episode is to make it a step-by-step tactical playbook for eight and nine figure businesses from the founders who built them. So today we're going to go through the journey of scaling a business in the stages of zero to one million, one million, 10 million, 10 million to 50, 50 to 100 and beyond.
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And so at those early stages of going from zero to 1 million, you just mentioned 18 steps need to happen in the correct order to really scale paid ads. So do you think that it's smart to start there at that stage of business? Or what are the steps that you find?
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that most businesses can follow to go from zero to 1 million? So I started with a bit of a brand, not a very prominent brand on social media, but I had a couple hundred thousand unengaged followers following me. Maybe I would post random stuff from my personal life. I wasn't really focused, not a strong message.
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But I did have a starting place there. So I started with social media and then I got a little bit of momentum. And as soon as I could hire a person part-time to start doing paid media, I did because I didn't have a strong enough brand with enough following and enough engagement to really support a business on my own social media.
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Now my social media is a much more important aspect of my brand, but prior to today, it was how fast can I get paid media going because I needed an influx of people and I couldn't really lean on. So to answer your question, do I recommend people get into paid media? Yes, I recommend they get into it right away and start working on that acquisition channel.
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you have to get one channel working really well. I didn't like utilizing social media as my acquisition channel because I'm not very skilled at social media. So I'm not a Nashville born influencer. You know, that's not my gift zone, but I could engineer paid media. So I'm more of an engineer by my training.
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So I thought paid media would be a much easier set of skills for me to obtain because social media was a little bit fleeting. But I know people that don't do anything on paid media. They do it all on social media, and they do quite well there. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
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I've found that it's really important to go from the zero to one million stage to have one offer for one person, typically with one acquisition channel and just stay focused there. And the one offer is really important because a lot of people, myself, including those early stages, you spread yourself too thin. You want to offer too many things because you have a smaller client base or prospect base that you're talking to. And then it spreads the business out. So I've
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My company, AlterCall, did over a million in its first year, hosting dinners at my home. So my offer was, come spend the day with me. It's $5,000, and I only have 12 seats at my dinner table, and I would host these dinners. And then from there, I took the gains from, the profits from the people that gladly tended their money for me to mentor them and teach them, and then I built up my infrastructure from there.
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But it was, you know, bed and breakfast basically at my home without the bed side of it. But we fed them. We hiked with them. We prayed with them. And then I taught them some business tactics and strategies. And that was the single offer that started AlterCole.
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Okay. I love that. And going back to what you mentioned, you had a brand and reputation at that point. You already had a public exit of $792 million. And so that gave you a jumpstart where, I mean, myself included, I would love that offer of coming by like an intimate dinner, learning from someone with the credentials that you have. But if it's someone who's watching this,
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who does not have a reputation, they're newer into the business realm, they don't have the existing following, what do you feel are some of the most crucial first steps to take for starting to scale up their business? The reason why I have a brand in a best-selling book is because that was a strategy because I started without any of the reputation. And Tony Robbins once said, and he's a person I love a lot and I've known him for quite some time, he said, you want to influence a room before you walk into it. Mm-hmm.
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and that that really resonated with me because i'd walk into a room and then have to figure out how to influence them so when i first started my career i would book a free training at a real estate office and i would just say this guy ryan blair who's a successful sales trainer will give you a free training and if you like it you can come to a seminar they didn't know who i was didn't know anything and i had to win them over in the room uh cold and i would do that day in and day out you know four or five appointments a day
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So if you don't yet have a brand or a reputation, you got to get out there and you got to do it the hard way. You can also leverage other people who do have brands and reputation. So, you know, there's no excuse in my book. If you don't have a reputation, go build one. Go do it the hard way. Get in front of people.
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host events, join other people's events. You have to figure it out. I didn't have anything. I knew that that would be an asset. So as I started generating revenue, I started implementing PR strategies, implementing speaking strategies, brand strategies, book strategies, because I knew that that would make life easier, but I had to do it the hard way.
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So a lot of it sounds like was bootstrapped. And then when you're implementing PR strategies, advertising strategies, were you working with other vendors and agencies at that time to get that going? Or were you also bootstrapping that yourself, figuring out how to get into the PR space and these different verticals?
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Yeah, my first big break was on a TV show called Larry Elder, and we cold emailed them. I cold emailed the agent who later became the agent for my book, my two books. And so I do it the hard way to start, and then I get money from the hard way, and then I try to get some talent around me to make it a little bit easier. Yeah.
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cold emails, cold outreach, reaching out to people, figuring out who do I need to meet that can help me solve that problem. And that was always the mindset, it still is. So if I didn't have the capital to hire a publicist, I would reach out to journalists, I'd reach out to reporters, to people connected to media, bookers for podcasts, for different media shows, and I would just run a process.
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Yeah, something a lot of people don't think about too is when you're reaching out to journalists and people who work for television networks, et cetera, their job is to give bookings. And so you're actually adding value to them by reaching out to them as well. If you have a compelling offer or story to tell.
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So what you just said, adding value, their job is to book interesting people, right? If you do all of the work for them to book you, they'll book you. Most people are lazy and they don't do the work. So maybe I write up five or six hooks or five or six angles and give them the five or six articles to choose from and they choose one of them and maybe they refine it a little bit and then they publish it. The more work that you're willing to do, the more likely you are to get the gig.
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So for example, for Larry Elder, there was a few tasks that they made me do to get on his national syndicated TV show on NBC. And I did the work, right? I wanted that. I wanted that more than anything. You know, I practiced, I rehearsed, I prepared for my interviews. And then, you know, when I got the opportunity, of course, you know, it was a big step for me to build a brand. But, you know, that was just one small thing that I did. And I've had to do thousands of different initiatives to be able to build a brand.
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Yeah, and a lot of people would hear that and think that was a very effective strategy to take 10, 20 years ago. Today, TV's dying. It's not as much. Even if the TV network that you go on doesn't have a huge level of reach, hundreds of thousands, millions of people, the credibility and the authority that you get from being featured on a network like that, that you can then leverage in your business, on your website, in your content, can still produce value in tenfold. More important is the belief that you get
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So no one knows who Larry is. I mean, not a lot of people know who he is. But the fact that I was on national television put a new level of belief in me. Later on, as I scaled up my sales teams, I realized that the more PR that I did, the more belief I would place in my belief bank account in my sales team. And that's priceless.
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Because every day, belief gets removed from your account. So if I could add belief to your bank account, then you're going to be able to sell more. So the PR added belief to my bank account. And as a result, I showed up more congruent. I had more conviction than what I was selling. And ultimately, we're always selling ourselves.
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So always think about your belief bank account, and then what are the things that can add to that belief bank account? PR is one of them, doing podcasts. For me, it's church and spirituality, but increasing your belief increases your congruence, and the more congruent you are, the more that you're going to be able to influence people to an outcome that you're seeking to influence them to.
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I love that concept of belief banking. And you have to have a level of belief in yourself to even reach out to the Larry Ellison show in the first place to get on. And I believe that's a huge struggle that many people in that zero to one million stage have is they don't have the level of belief that they need to, to think that they can shoot even far past that.
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Well, by the way, the secret, you know, I've had, I had a $65 million a month. I believed, I believed that I was worthy of $65 million that month. I believed I was worthy of a hundred million dollars. In fact, you know, I, I soon set my sights beyond that. And then I sold the company. Why did you believe that? What caused you to have that belief in yourself?
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Maybe I'm a little crazy, right? I don't have a connection to money that most people don't. To me, it's just keeping score, it's all a game. And it doesn't shape me, it doesn't define me. My identity is not connected to the amount of money I make in a given month. And that's why I'm always able to make a whole lot of money and continue to make more money and help people raise their beliefs up on the subject of money.
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Because it's just, of course, I'm going to do $100 million a month in sales. Why would I not? Now, it's hard to do that. You've got to engineer. You've got to figure out the right people. You've got to figure out the right business model, the right go-to-market fit. It is really hard. So once you have the belief, then you've got to do the hard work. But the belief is always there.
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Yeah. That's what I'm excited about is your specialty is really taking businesses from more of the 10 million and above stage to 100 million and beyond and then hundreds of millions in revenue. And I think that you've taken a few businesses even past the 10 figure mark in the billions as well. Yeah.
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So I'm very excited to dive into that, which we're going to get into. So to more so recap the zero to 1 million stage, you need to have the level of belief that you can accomplish this, have, you know, one offer, one person, one channel, reach out. You mentioned cold email. I think that's one of the greatest tools for someone in that stage because it's essentially free.
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Yeah, everything is free to go from zero to 1 million for the most part. You need a voice, a phone, a calendar, and a social media account, and you can do a million in sales. Yeah. That's it, right? And most entrepreneurs, they think they need 1,000 things. And one of the principles I learned early on in entrepreneurship is that I have all that I need to achieve my goals.
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We get in this thing where I need this, I need that, and we think that it's outside of us, and it's not. You have everything that you need to hit your goals. And if you think about entrepreneurship, back in the day, they didn't have social media, and yet people still were able to achieve great success. They didn't have digital calendars. They didn't have an iPhone, a computer in their pocket with the ability to sit there and dial people. They didn't have free long distance.
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They had to do it the hard way. It is very easy to hit a million dollars. You just need a phone, a voice, a calendar, and a social media account. I agree. The opportunity has never been easier than before with today of what's available. And that's another very common mistake I see business owners make in that stage is they don't create content when they're from zero to one million and feel that they don't have the time, nor does it make sense for them to do it at that stage yet. When I would argue that that's one of the most important pillars to start day one of creating content.
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content. What are your thoughts on that? Give me 90 days and I'll give you 100 million views. That's our most successful ad hook. And it's also true. We've generated over 100 million views in one month for Grant Cardone, Dr. Pompa, Hustle Phil, Greg O'Gallagher, Dropouts Podcast, and generated tens of millions of views per month for dozens more brands like Prey.com, Fashion Nova, Jay Shetty, and many more. And this also works if you have a smaller following as well.
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Attention is the most valuable resource. So ask yourself, what would this amount of views do for your business? And if you want to know more, go to mediascaling.com and let's talk to see if it's a good fit.
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You know, I was terrible at it. I resisted it. I didn't like it. I thought this isn't me. I would say, I'm not good at that. I don't like it. I don't want it. And I realized that I have to develop this aptitude, even if it goes against my natural nature. I'm more introverted in nature. I'm not the first person to pick up the phone and share what I'm up to during the day.
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So I'm more introverted. It doesn't come natural to me. And like anything in life, that's the fun stuff, is learning the hard stuff, learning to do the things that you don't like doing, that you're not gifted at. That's where you humble yourself. That's where you gain the most perspective. That's where you get to know what you're made of. And so I had to lean into this.
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One technique that I did during COVID is I started a Zoom and I did it every day for 483 days in a row. And so pretty soon I was just comfortable talking to a camera. And of course, I hired a videographer, I filmed, I'd have to retake and retake and retake and I still do.
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And I still have a lot of bloopers and I still have a lot of frustration, but it's something that I have to become good at. You will not be successful in modern society if you don't master the skills of creating content, period.
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Yeah, I completely agree. And I'm also in the same boat with you of being more introverted. I, for a long time, I've built my career in business, in social media, but was not an active user of it myself in terms of I never liked to post. I didn't like to put any content out there about myself either. And that's what held me back for a long time from creating. Yeah.
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And so many other business owners feel like that as well. They don't want to be known. They want their privacy. They don't want to constantly just feel like they need to live on camera all the time. They don't feel like they have the time for it. So people who have that thought process going through their mind, what would you say to them?
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I would challenge it. You know, I'm a coach. A good coach is going to challenge your assumptions, challenge your questions, challenge your beliefs. I think that it's an excuse to play a small game. And I was playing that game too. People say, I don't want to be known. I want to be private. Is that the truth? If you had massive influence and massive notoriety and massive awareness...
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Couldn't you make the world a little better place than if you're small and no one knows who you are and no one cares who you are? But if people know who you are and they care who you are, can that open up doors that you might be able to put to great work? So when a person says that, I think my natural inclination is they're playing a very small game.
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Now, you can still be private and say you don't want to be known and play a different game. But I would say that you would be more influential, more effective, and make a bigger impact if you are known. So you should be known. In fact, we need people that don't want to be known to pursue being known.
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Like you want to work with the leader who doesn't want to be the leader, but they're called to it. And so they do it because the world needs them. So the world needs more influential people that are grounded in their values, as opposed to people who want to be known for the sake of being famous. I want to be known for the sake of making an impact. I want to be known for the sake of rising people up and inspiring people. And so I have no choice but to be known in order for me to fulfill my soul's purpose.
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So a person who says, I don't want to be known, I think that God can put them to better use if they are known than if they're not known. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's something that truly is needed. And at this point, I don't think it's optional if you truly want to grow the business to the point that it can and create the impact that you want to create. It's the new modern day website. Websites are not optional. Social media and having a content presence is not optional. Yeah.
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Yeah, it's marketing. Like if you want to have a successful business, you have to have some form of marketing and social media is marketing. And it's also the new modern day business card. Yeah. Even if it's not an acquisition channel getting you a lot of new clients, people who come into your world from wherever, if you're meeting them in person, if you are cold emailing them, they're going to go check you out on socials and see, are you legitimate? Can they build trust? Are you adding value to your content or not?
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By the way, that is my view of my personal social media. And I do step out of my comfort zone, I post and I'll share the sunrise, I'll share me at my cabin or me getting in and some fun or something like that. It's a way that people will come to know you and build trust and in this day and age,
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There's a lot of untrustworthy people out there. So people are craving authenticity. They're craving to trust the people they do business with. And it's a way that you can show who you truly are to people so they know whether or not they should do work with you or not. Yeah.
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Yeah, and that goes back to what we started on with paid ads. Yeah. It is incredibly hard, I would say, nearly impossible today to successfully scale and profitably scale paid ads without a good organic content strategy backing it up because of trust and because of the credibility aspect. Every day, many people follow me for the first time that originate from my paid ads.
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So they see the ad, they're like, who's this guy? I'm not sure about him. I'm going to follow him and check him out for a little bit. They follow me. They kind of see what I'm up to. They see what's going on in my life. I share a few things here and there. Maybe I'm out to dinner with my wife, or maybe I'm having fun with my son. And they go, okay, this guy seems interesting. I'll talk to him. Mm-hmm.
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So it is the new brochure, but it's a brochure into who you truly are. And I embrace it fully. It's a part of me now. And it's something that I'm getting better at. On a one to 10, I'm probably a six in comparison to the people who are really good at this stuff. And I'm working to close the gap between where I'm at today and some of the people that are best in the world at the subject.
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Yeah. Well, for what it's worth, I love your content. I think you're great. And I think you're building a cool movement. And a lot of people on socials sound like others. You have your own unique voice and you're carving your own path, which I truly appreciate.
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One of my clients said that I'm crazy. He says, you say stuff on paid ads and on your social media that is crazy. It is straight up crazy and they love it. So I'm out there sharing my values, I'm sharing my beliefs.
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I believe that I'm going to advance the kingdom of God one degree a day by way of what I share. And so I have a bit of the audacity to share God's work in my life. And I'm really not trying to make myself famous. I'm trying to make God famous. That's my secret agenda with what I'm sharing, that I'm doing everything I can to glorify God and his work in my life. And I need to use these tools to do that.
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Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Cause also in the business space, you're one of the rare few who combine the word of God and his glory behind your message. Um, a lot of businesses don't want to breach that subject and talk about God, talk about their beliefs. What would your, what are your thoughts on that? Like, do you feel that people should be scared and held back in any way? Are there any consequences to a business for showcasing that as part of their brand or
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Well, yeah, there are some consequences, of course, but the reason why they don't share it is because they don't have the skill to. And the reason why they don't have the skill to is no one's ever really led the way to explain to people that you can indeed share in such a way that invites people as opposed to repels them. You know, you can share in such a way that attracts people towards you that are in alignment with your values without, you know, repelling people or sounding fake or sounding like you're using God's name in vain or you're using God's name to make money.
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So, you know, also when you do share, you know, your spiritual path, you are going to invite people to attack you. You're going to take arrows. You're going to invite people to criticize you, to judge you. And the enemy, in my opinion, in my faith, there's a dark force and there's a light force. The enemy is going to try to stop you. And so a lot of people don't share because they're afraid of the ramifications of sharing or because they don't have the skill to share.
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Yeah, I'm more new to a revived faith with Christianity myself. And it's something to where I haven't studied it enough to where I feel like I stumble over my words a little bit when I start to speak on the subject. You're so eloquent and very concise and convicted in the words that you say behind it.
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Did that come from you just really embracing and studying, like reading the Bible and studying the scripture or is that natural to you or how did you develop that?
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Well, there's multiple gifts in spirituality, one of which is the gift for the Word, to know the Word, to be able to preach the Word. I don't have that gift. Billy Graham has that gift. He can preach the Word. He knows the Word. He's no longer with us, but he was an encyclopedia. I admire him. When you watch his speeches, it's like, wow. Wow.
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I don't have that gift. Maybe it's being developed in me. Maybe I'll obtain it over time. I do read the word every single day. I have the gift of testimony, of authentically sharing my testimony and my experience and how God has changed my life. And so I share my testimony. That's my calling. I'm studying the word every day.
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I'm a junior when it comes to the theologians out there. That's not my lane. My lane is I know God. I've experienced his miracles in a variety of different ways. I have conviction that God exists, that God has made an impact in my life, and he can in yours. And I'm here just to share that conviction. I'm not the most eloquent speaker on the subject, nor am I the most knowledgeable, but I will share the most.
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What's one top experience that you've had that brought the conviction where you say you truly do know God? Oh, I've had many. Well, you know, the times when I've been at rock bottom, where I thought it was over, I thought I was done,
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You know, I begged God for forgiveness. I begged God to heal me. I had addiction. I was suffering from addiction. I was suffering from the pursuit of lust and of pleasure. And I didn't like who this guy was. This programming was flawed. It was broken. It was destructive. It was damaging myself. It was damaging others. And I said, God, I don't wanna be this human being anymore.
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And in that moment, I get emotional sharing it. He picked me up and there's other moments. My mother was in a coma for two years and I was about to take her off life support. And I prayed to God, please, I don't wanna take my mom off life support.
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And I told her, I said, if you want to live, you better show a sign of it. And she woke up. And my son was suffering from autism. And I prayed to God to please help him heal. I wanted him to be functional and successful and to live a great life. And I took him through a baptism. And in that baptism, I saw his eyes change. And I saw healing come over him. And he no longer suffers from the symptoms of autism like he used to. And so...
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I've seen countless miracles in my life, in the lives of many people that I've prayed with. I've been in prayer circles and watched miracles occur. So I have unequivocal evidence in my mind of God's work in my life and in the lives of others.
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And those are the big things, but the small things too, you know, there's, there's time where I'm frustrated, I'm struggling and I just surrender. And I put, put my life in God's hands and I let him do the work and miracles occur. And I see it happen all the time in the environments that I work in with the companies I support. You know, there's times where they're out of money and we're praying and a check winds up coming earlier, payment gets made early and, you know, comes just in time. And so...
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I'm praying with my clients all the time. We're trying to invoke God in our work in many different ways. And we see the results of that in miraculous ways that cannot be quantified. Yeah, that is miraculous.
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It sounds like in those experiences, your prayers were answered quickly in a concise timeframe. What about so many who feel like their prayers are going unanswered? There's many prayers that have been answered just in time. There are prayers that haven't been answered. There are, and that's a common occurrence for all of us. Mm-hmm.
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We have to look at ourselves and the way that we're praying and what we're praying for and from what place we're praying from. If we're praying to learn and to grow, to become better, to sharpen our skills, to become the person capable of what we're seeking to receive, that prayer gets answered. If we're praying to grow in our belief in our Heavenly Father,
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that prayer gets answered. If we're praying to become better versions of ourselves, those prayers are answered. When we're praying for a shortcut, oftentimes God doesn't answer that prayer because he wants you. He is your father. He is a great father. He wants you to grow. He wants you to develop. He wants you to become wiser, to make better decisions. And so if you're willing to do the work and pray, your prayers are often answered. And so,
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And that's what I pray for. I pray to become the person capable of achieving the success that I'm seeking. I don't pray for a shortcut. And a lot of people pray for a shortcut. But it's a method of connecting. And in that connection, and there's technique to it. And as you develop the technique and you develop the method of connection, you're more connected. And the more connected you are, the more your prayers are answered.
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What's the difference between praying for an outcome that you desire versus praying for a shortcut? Well, I want a million dollars, you know, and I pray for a million dollars, right? And, you know, God can drop, he can drop a million dollars worth of gold in my backyard right now. He made it rain for Moses, right? Loaves came falling down. And so why doesn't he just drop a million dollars worth of gold in my backyard?
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Well, he wants me to earn that gold because, yes, he may have already seeded me to receive a million dollars, but he wants me to earn that million dollars. So I must take action. I must develop. And God sends me that million dollars through lessons, through people.
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through sharpening my discernment, through sharpening my skill, through activating new gifts and new capacities, through humbling me and reminding me that I am here to worship him and not money. And so if I do the work and I follow the lesson plan that God has in store for me, the million dollars comes and the prayer gets answered.
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But if I'm unwilling to do the work or if I'm not aware of how the system works, then oftentimes it seems like the prayer goes unanswered. But it's not. God's just waiting for you to take the appropriate action. Yeah, it's powerful. Because I do think that that concept of what you're referring to as the shortcut is why so many people feel like their prayers do go unanswered. They're focused on the wrong spotlight.
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But you have to be as grateful for the unanswered prayer as you are for the answered prayer. The reason why, a lot of times, the reason why people don't get their prayers answered is because they're not grateful for the prayers that have already been answered. So...
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If you're not grateful for what God has already given you, he's not going to give you more. So most often it's an absence of gratitude that hinders them from going to that next step. If you're grateful for the air that you breathe, for the moment, the technology that's connecting us, if you're grateful for the food that you eat, if you're grateful for what you do have, you're signaling to God that you're ready for more.
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You're capable of more. But if you're not grateful for what you do have, then God's not going to give you more. And so there's many tricks that the enemy plays on us to stop us from getting our prayers answered. It's not God. Oftentimes it's that we're falling from one of these many tricks that hinder us from answering, getting our prayers answered. But it's often just a lack of gratitude that stops us.
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That's a really powerful framing behind gratitude that I haven't heard before. There's also been a very impactful visualization exercise that I've been doing more frequently over the last year to where if you close your eyes and you picture that you are sitting in front of God,
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And you give God your problems and you give him your guidance because life and business can be incredibly stressful. And I found that to be one of the most impactful techniques to relieve stress of giving my problems to God and even taking it further, visualizing it versus just thinking that in my mind.
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and having the faith that everything is going to work as it should be. And when you combine that with what you mentioned earlier, the belief that you are someone who is more than capable to build a business to 10 million or 100 million, or even if it's not business, but it's just any realm in life of what lights you up and what you find successful, I think you're going to live with a lot more peace and more joy and follow a better path.
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Well, let's break down what you just described in your meditation, which is amazing that you've built this practice. One, you're holding it. So you're holding your challenges. Two, you're surrendering by giving it to God. You're actually surrendering your challenges. Three, you're inviting God into your challenges. You're inviting him into the deepest parts of you.
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Even the parts of you that you don't think God wants to be a part of, this person's not working out well. Do I hire this person? Do I fire this person? Do I invest in this? Do I not invest in this? You're inviting God into every part of you. And in that invitation, God can do his work. And then the last item is you're developing your trust.
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And that's the thing. So we have fear, right? So what if I'm making a bad decision? What if my company doesn't work out to the degree that I need it to to be able to pay payroll or provide for my family or take care of my kids? So we all have fear. But the antidote to fear is faith. And the way that you build your faith is through trusting in God. So you give God your problems and you trust God will give you the clarity and the energy and the skills and the gifts necessary to solve those problems. I love that.
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I want to take it back to, I feel we covered a lot of ground as well on the path of zero to one million. So starting to get to that stage of going from one to 10 million, what do you feel the steps are and some very frequent patterns that you see on that journey?
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Well, one to 10 million, you need to have more product market fit, meaning people have to want your product. There has to be a decent sized population and audience that needs your product. So we need to have more product market fit. And then we need to have systems and tools in place to be able to take on a much larger group of clients. So you need to start engineering systems and building systems. And then you also have to have a team. Yeah.
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You have to have some rudimentary leadership in place. It doesn't have to be a big team, but you have to have a team at about the $10 million mark. You're leaning a lot more on your team than you on individually. And, you know, I think I even want to break it down further. One to 10 million is a big range. That's a thousand percent.
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One to three million is really hard. And then at the $3 million mark, you can start to afford to pay some talent. You can invest in systems and you realize that it no longer can rest on your shoulders. So from three to 10 million, it's team, it's systems, and it's product market fit. And it's getting into a much higher transactional environment, a higher transactional load.
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So you have to build your infrastructure to support that. And you have to have an effective business model to get to that $10 million mark. If you're not profit-centric and you're not thinking about your cost of goods or thinking about your profitability or your different ratios within your business,
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$10 million is hard to achieve. You have to have a rudimentary financial acumen and discipline to get to $10 million as well. And so those are fundamental. I learned financial discipline early in my career by way of working with venture capitalists and private equity groups. And so at AlterCol, I was able to get to $10 million very quickly because I had a very strong financial discipline in place that helped me get there.
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There's a lot to unpack there. Yeah. So I'm glad that I look at the stage of one to three million in business as the swamp of business because a lot of business owners are very profitable up to around that one million mark because they don't really have a team or maybe they hire a few VAs overseas, whatever the case. But a lot of it is dependent on their time. So they have higher profit margins
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And if you're at a million per year, maybe you have 30, 40% profit margins, 300, 400,000 per year to work with. What keeps them stuck is not having the team. And so you get to a crossroads where you have to decide, are you going to sacrifice that profit short term to hire the people with the risk that it may not work out? And you lower your margins. And a lot of people don't make that leap of faith.
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Well, here's the issue that I have with that. Why would you want to make $300,000 in profit on a million dollars a year, right? Like you can't live on that. That's a job. You might as well just go get a job. You got all this stress, you got to carry all this burden, do all this work to make 300 grand a year. And they're usually working 80 hours a year. Yeah, right, you know what I mean? Like why, so to me, when I started AlterCol,
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There was no profit at a million dollars a year because there was nothing to talk about at a million dollars a year. Everything goes back in the company until you get to a place, even at 10 million a year, everything goes back in the company until you're at a hundred million dollars a year. And then you can have some pretty significant profitability, but there's no way I want to take profits
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early because I can't live on $300,000 a year. You know, I, you know, and that's part of, so when you're, when you work in venture capital, they, we, we, we give the people money to spend. We don't want them taking profits at a million, at 3 million, at 10 million, at 20 million. We want them investing everything in it.
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so that they can get to that $100 million mark or beyond. And that's where the real profits start to kick in. And that's when it gets fun, when you're making 30 million in profit or 100 million in profit. But you're never gonna get to 100 million in profit if you're taking 30% of your $1 million in income. That $300,000 should be invested in hiring a new team member, implementing new systems, experimenting more with paid media,
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ramping up your sales team, there's much better uses for $300,000, you know, and so that's why raising money, using other people's money, or, you know, just doubling down and reinvesting in your business until you get it up there. So many people I see never get past the $1 million mark because they're treating their company like a job. Right.
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Yeah. And they, I've, I've met a lot of business owners who have been around that one, two, 3 million per year stage for five, 10 years because of exactly what we're talking about. They treat it like a job. They have a higher than average income, but they're stuck. And they're also burnt out after doing it for that five to 10 year period because they don't have the team to operate and run the business for them. And so it's, it's still, when you're looking at it from a multi-decade view, it's, it's still a short-term play.
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Well, let me tell you why their math is wrong on this. So they think $300,000, that's nice, right? I think if I hire two people with that $300,000, $150,000 a year each, and those two people are salespeople, for example, and they make me 10 times what their salary is. So that's $1.5 million and $1.5 million. So I'm making, on that $300,000, I'm making an additional $3 million. Yeah. Right now, with that addition- Where else are you going to get a return like that? With that, what's that? Where else are you going to get a return like that?
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Right, you know, and so I'm hiring salespeople. I don't want to simplify this in that scenario. And, you know, and frankly, I have salespeople on my team now that make me a much higher return on their salary costs than 10X. But, you know, I'm giving you, the way I think about this is when I hire people, I have an ROI analysis on every individual that I hire and I have a thesis on that. So I'm not...
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taking money out of my pocket by hiring these people, I'm hiring people that are gonna yield me results and generate either income or cost savings, right? So every human being in your company should either drive revenue or drive efficiencies in the business that help you drive revenue or help you reduce costs.
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So every employee in the early stages is profit. They're profitable. They should be profitable very quickly. You do have to bear the burden to get them ramped up and to get them profitable. But I have an ROI thesis on every employee I hire, and I work really hard to get them to a return on investment for me.
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So I don't see hiring and investing in my team and my infrastructure as an expense. I see it as an investment. Yeah, that's the entire mindset shift right there is employees are not an expense, a sunk cost, a liability. They're an asset, they're an investment. And you're going to get a higher rate on return of what you pay for payroll or contract if they're 1099 or whatever the case. Yep. There versus anywhere else. So that's the philosophy, but to actually implement that philosophy and to make that philosophy work,
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that requires a lot of skill because you have to be able to hold people accountable. You have to tell people, hey, I hired you. If I hired you for 100 grand, I know you make a lot more than that. And let's say you're starting your career. It's, oh, again, I'm hiring you for $100,000 a year. That's roughly $8,000 a month.
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I expect you to generate $80,000 a month. And you're going to say, well, how do I do that? Now we're going to have to break down all of your workflows, your process. I'm going to have to call you every day. I'm going to have to hold you accountable. It might take you six months to make that $80,000 a month. I don't have to stick with my investment and not give up on my investment in you until you do. And then once you do, great. Now I go make that next hire. Mm-hmm.
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So they just don't have the discipline, the skill, the communication, the leadership, the process engineering to get that person to go from an expense to a profit center. And so that's the skill gap that they have to close. Yeah, yeah. And that comes down to management, which a lot of business owners say they hate managing people. And usually those are, again, business owners between the one to 10 million per year stage. And that's on them. It's not on the people they have. It's their fault if they hate to manage people.
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So I want to dive in on that, but first go back to, you mentioned that, especially in the earlier stages, but really throughout business, you have an ROI analysis, return analysis, that you calculate for every employee that you bring on. Do you have a framework for that, or how do you approach that?
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So every team member is different. So like, for example, I'm hiring a sales manager right now. The target compensation is $300,000, of which about 50% is bonus. And so I need to figure out, all right, how do I pay him that $150,000 bonus? Well, I'd like to pay him the $150,000 once he recovers my $150,000 investment in his payroll, plus benefits and everything else.
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some factor, right? So I don't want to give him the 150 if he does nothing. I want to give him that 150 once he's recovered. 150 times five, let's say, maybe he's bonus eligible for 25% of the bonus. So I'm structuring, my framework is I create an incentive structure that drives the behavior of the person to generate the profitability for me. So that's step one, making sure I incent them accordingly. And every employee,
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I look at their incentives, I look at their role, and I structure their compensation and their first 90 days to generate the most highest probability of them getting to profitability. So every employee, whether I'm hiring a person in the finance department, okay, how are they gonna improve my AR so that way they're paying for themselves?
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How are they going to improve my cash flow so that way they're paying for themselves times five in cash flow? If I'm hiring a person in customer service, how are they going to retain clients more effectively? How are they going to create a client experience for me that is going to make it more conducive to my clients expanding their relationship with me?
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So every role has a thesis to it. Every role has unique compensation connected to it. And I try to align those incentives with the behaviors that I want. And then of course I hire people and I explain to them very clearly, these are the behaviors that I'm seeking in your role. These are the objectives. And then of course, I'm working with them hand in hand to make sure that they can't.
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behave the way I need them to behave to achieve the objectives I need them to achieve. So that way I have the profitability. So that's the framework that I look at. And I developed this framework over 30 years in business. So that's basically the way I do the math and hiring. And that's why I can scale very fast. And I can also attract very talented people. And I can motivate those talented people to achieve pretty extraordinary results.
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Yeah, immediately even watching your content, this is not my first conversation with you. I think your greatest characteristic is you're an incredible leader. And you can see that right away, like you exude it. And I think that's probably what's so impactful about you. I've met some of your team. Your team is incredible.
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You bring in really, really talented people into your ecosystem and your sphere. We're going to dive into that too. But going back to being in the swamp of one to three million per year, you mentioned that you have to take those profits, reinvest, make those early hires. There's variables depending on what business and industry you're in. But what are some of those most crucial early hires that you think is most strategic for majority of businesses?
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Most businesses fail to generate, to figure out their revenue systems and their revenue operations. That's the area I focus on first. Sales solves all problems in all businesses for the most part. I know someone watching this might say, no, it doesn't. But 99% of all businesses are going to improve if you just add more revenue to them, right? So let's go work on that first. Where I see entrepreneurs make the mistake that,
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is they don't like doing that. They like working on building the product or on the infrastructure or building the website. And my mind is, I need to get my revenue engine firing at eight of 12 cylinders as fast as possible. And then I need to work on the other four. And I put my energy on revenue operations until I have that effectively scaling. Now,
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putting 80% of my energy on revenue ops. And then I'm putting the other 20% to make sure that as the revenue comes in, it's being served, right? In early stages. And then as the revenue starts scaling and moving up, I then move my energy toward the other aspects of the business to make sure that we don't break the business too much by adding too much revenue.
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Is there generally a marker, like a revenue level or signs that you look at in the business where you start to make that shift and put more towards the product, the service, the back end versus the front end marketing and sales? At every level up, you know, it's like a stair step.
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So you move up a level, and then you got to go work a little more. And then you move up a level, and you got to go work a little more. And there's checks and balances within your ecosystem that you're building. And the checks and balances are going to be felt by way of customers leaving, complaining, asking for refunds, or team members leaving, complaining, or being burnt out. So there's all these checks and balances. As you push the revenue button, the organization will tell you where it needs to work,
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And then, so at each level, you got to do engineering. So just think of it like I'm engineering this level up and then I'm going and engineering in here and I'm constantly engineering at different levels. The main levels are, you know, one to three million is the hard way. Three to 10 million, there's a lot of engineering being done on the system side. 10 million to a hundred million, it's a lot of engineering. But I, as the founder, am always focused on the number one problem in the company,
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the number one bottleneck in the company, and I never take my eye off revenue. One mistake I see founders make is they want to outsource revenue. They want to hand revenue to someone else, defer revenue. Hey, if you could just go make me a billion on the revenue side, it's much more fun to hire. It's much more fun to hang out and build infrastructure. That's the fun part. Usually when they do that, they're just like, okay, do it. They don't even provide any training, any guidance, and they rush them into that role as well. Yeah.
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Yeah, they hire the sales manager and say, okay, here, it's for you now. And then I'm going to go work with the people in the warehouse. I'm going to go work with the engineers because I love doing that. I don't like building the sales front. You can't outsource your problems. You have to own every aspect of your business. You have to be involved. You have to be in the weeds. You have to be into the details. I've had to learn that the hard way.
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I've had to develop the characteristics to roll up my sleeves and get into the weeds of every detail of the business in order to scale it. You can't just outsource your problems. The other mistake people make is they hire experts. They think, oh, I'll hire this person from Meta, and they'll go do it better than me. You are the founder of your company. You are the foremost expert in how your company works. There's no one that's going to come in from the outside and do your business better than you.
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Yes, you partner with people that have skill and experience from formidable companies, but you need to partner with them and you can never lose sight of the different practice areas that make your business tick. Many people I know, they hire the sales manager that came from this big company and they go down a notch or even things fall apart and they have to come back in and they're constantly spinning plates because they don't realize that you're a founder and a founder should be connected to their business and they should be connected to every aspect of their business.
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They don't understand the role of a founder is to be connected to their business, to know their numbers, to know the problems going on in the business, know the key constraints, know the levers that need to be pulled, and to make decisions and to remove blocks, remove barriers, and to move the company forward. And you can't outsource that or defer the decisions necessary to do that to others. You have to be a part of those decisions.
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Yeah. You also mentioned the early hires in that phase of business should be focused on sales. One of the most challenging phases that I've gone through and now thankfully gotten out of is getting out of founder-led sales. That was my job for...
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a year and a half. I was taking majority of the sales calls, bringing in majority of the business. I had multiple failed attempts of hiring sales reps and not being able to pass off calls and having churn in that role. And it was a process and there's a challenge. And I meet a lot of other people who are in that phase as well. And they're the founder, they're still taking almost all the sales calls and they have the real challenge with that as well. So
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Do you have steps, frameworks that you tend to follow that you found to be very successful out of scaling out of being the sales rep of your company, taking all those front end calls and starting to build a team? Yeah. And I've known you for a little while now and I watched you do it. And I acknowledge you for being able to make that shift. We should always be training people in our process.
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So as a founder, if I get on a sales call, which I do for our larger clients, I have other people on the call with me. I'm never doing it alone. I'm always doing it with other people. I'm always training them in the process, and I'm seeking to duplicate myself. Some...
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processes are harder to duplicate and take a long time. It might take years to duplicate it, but you should always duplicate yourself. You should never do anything alone as a founder. You should always have someone with you. I mean, even getting on a flight, you shouldn't do it alone. You should always be duplicating yourself and teaching and equipping people under your stewardship to be effective in whatever process you're running.
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And that's the mistake most founders make because they do it alone. They should always have other people there and they should be training people at all times. Yeah, shadowing. It's one of the most effective ways to train. I do very few things alone. And then now, because we're a Zoom environment, we're remote, we record everything and then we train on everything. So even if there's not another person on the call with me, because that might not be the most effective use of time, the call is recorded and the call is shared and people are learning from the call.
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That was one of the biggest keys that allowed me to finally break out of the founder-led sales trap, if you will, is I had one of our top closers still with us today. He was shadowing me on sales calls for over three months. And then we're scheduling separate trainings, role plays on top of that. I started to have him take calls with some of our lower tier offers and build up from there. But it was a grind. And we also had to...
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pay him the comp for him to go through that phase as well, because we were making a mistake of trying to go very much so fully commission based early stages. And then they wouldn't have the skillset, the training, the opportunities to make the money that they wanted to make in commission that first month, two months at that phase. Um, and it caused more turn versus we started to finally pay out a base to go through that training phase.
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And I'll share with you the trap that you fell into there. And this is the one that we all fall into. And my first venture capitalist broke me out of this. When I was 21 years old, I raised like a couple million bucks for a telecom company. And I was making $75,000 a year. And my VCs insisted I hire a COO and the COO was making 150.
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And I thought to myself, how am I going to pay somebody more than me, right? And he said, you've got it all wrong. You make your money in equity. Your team makes their money in cash. You should be paying people more than you. So most founders try to say, well, if I'm only making $10,000 a month, well, then I need to hire people making $2,000 a month, which is an employee-minded situation. You make your money in equity, right? You're not making your money. You should be paying people more than you. You should be paying people...
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very great wages. So if you wanna have $100 million company, flash forward, your executive team, your inner circle is all going to be making somewhere between $300 and a million dollars each. Say your top five people on your team, right? At 100 million, at 250 million,
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Those people are going to be making a million to a million five each. You know, at 500 million to a billion dollars, you might have your top five people all making, you know, between 1.5 and 2.5 million dollars each. Okay. You have to find a way to mentally get there before you're there.
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How do I recruit people worth $2.5 million a year to come work for me now? How do I recruit people that command a $500,000 a year salary to come work for me now when I'm only doing $500,000 a year? That's what...
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I learned by working with venture capitalists and prominent private equity people, if you share in the wealth, if you share in the equity, if you create incentive structures, you can recruit talent that can command $500,000 a year to come work in a company barely making $500,000 a year. And that's the shift you have to make. Most founders, they're so, and I love them, I bootstrapped my way multiple times over,
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And that they just, they can't get it out of their head that I'm only making $100,000 a year. I can't afford a person that makes $500,000. It's like, no, I need to find a way to be able to afford a person that makes $500,000 a year right now so that I quit making $100,000 a year and I start making $1 million a year. And so you have to raise your perception around what you pay people. And you have to realize that great talented people, they're in command in the marketplace. They can name their wage. Many people want them. So you have to figure out how to pay them.
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What would you say to, you mentioned focus on equity and be willing to pay people more. The value of a founder is the equity of your business. What do you say to founders who look at their business more as a cash flow center versus building to exit? Like they're not looking to sell the company or build for a big exit.
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Generally, that's going to be the crowd. Their business is bootstrapped. They didn't go and raise money through venture capital or the private equity model is still usually rolling up businesses and having an exit. So with the cash flow-focused business owners, what would you say there? Is it a different approach or different mindset?
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Well, how much value is the employee going to make and how much of that value are you willing to share with them for making it? I came into your business and you're in the HVAC business, let's say, for example, right? And you're doing $10 million a year. And I come in, I say, I'm going to build a sales system and a marketing system. I'm going to have leads coming in. And we're going to go from $10 million a year to $100 million a year, $50 million in EBITDA, which is going to be worth one day at exit, $150 million.
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Right? What's that worth to you? If I come in, take your $10 million business that you couldn't sell for pretty much anything today, maybe you get five for it, and I generate a hundred extra turn, I take $5 million in equity value to $150 million in equity value. How much of that would you share with me?
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If I could come in and do it, I was the guy, I had the skill, I had the team, I had the know-how, and I could do it. How much of that would you be willing to share with me? I'm asking you the question, like, let's say you own that business. Well, that leads to another question that I was going to follow up with is...
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It can be easy to give away too much equity too early. Yep. And so before I answer your question- No, Ant, just tell me what it would be, and then we can talk about how we can de-risk it for you. Okay. In terms of taking the business from $5 million to $150 million. Yep. I would gladly give 10, 20% if it was just that one person, that one hire. Yeah.
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Let's just say for round numbers, I get 20%. So you're going to give me $30 million. Once you get that $150 million paycheck, I get 30 of it. Deal, right? That sounds like a good deal? Yeah. So the vesting of the equity, so for round numbers, let's say we have –
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100% of equity and you own 70, I own 30. My 30% of vesting should happen as I'm tendering milestones on the way to that journey. So you tie my vesting toward me meeting certain milestones. So I think in this scenario that we're describing, we're talking about going to 100 million in revenue. So at 30 million, I unlock 10% of the 30% or 3%.
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And you can negotiate cliff vesting, monthly vesting, quarterly vesting, milestone vesting. You can negotiate these things. And a person like me, who is confident in my skills, is going to say, sure, I'll sign up for milestone vesting. I'll sign up for cliff vesting.
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I might have some contingencies that I want to make sure are in our agreement to ensure that you do your part, just like you're seeking me to do mine. But we can negotiate that. And a person who's capable of doing what they say they're going to do has no problem creating that type of vesting schedule. Yeah.
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Now, a person who isn't sure that they're going to do what they're going to do is going to insist on having all 30% of equity vested fully up front run. Right. I'm pretty good at what I do. I wouldn't ask for that. I wouldn't even want all 30% if I didn't deliver you the result. Yeah.
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If I said I could get us to 100 and I only got us to 50, maybe I get 50% of the 30% that you and I negotiated. And that's a fair deal. And I might be very happy with that. I wouldn't want all 30. I wouldn't want you to give me more equity than I deserve. I would never want in our partnership for you to be resentful of what you've given me because I didn't produce what I was capable of producing. Right. Right.
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Yeah. In your experience, because you've grown multiple companies past 100 million and beyond, and you've been an advisor to many more, is it one person who generally does that? If you're having a conversation, the example that you're using is one person is telling you they could scale the business to this 150 million and having a 30% vested equity conversation. You just give away 30% of your pool if that marker happens. Yeah.
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Are you looking at spreading that out? And do you have a mindset of, okay, I'm willing to give away this chunk of equity and I'm going to split that and I'm going to save some of it for later stages in the business as we're more developed to give equity to more future hires and team members? Yeah, absolutely.
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And so in the scenario I gave you with an HVAC company, and I know that space pretty well, I would command a large percentage because I – and I would put it all, you know, on the table for milestone investing because I can produce those results. I'm doing that right now in other environments. So one person can be a game changer in a business if you have a person that's highly skilled in sales and in marketing and in driving revenue.
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So, certainly, there are some people that command a substantial upside potential. But in general, across the board, it's going to take more than one person. You need to have an equity pool set up for your top three to five key individuals. No more than 10 have to have significant investing and certificates.
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significant stake in value contribution. But somewhere between three and 10 people are what's going to get you to the mountaintop of $100 million or beyond. But it's not a whole lot of people. You should include others in the equity participation, but the significant allocations should go to those people who are going to drive tremendous results.
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If you think about a company, it's generally going to have about seven departments or seven different practice areas. Some have nine, some have four, but let's just say seven. So maybe at best at 100 or 200, you're going to have seven people that deserve some significant portion of the upside in what you're going to build, whether it be exit through dividends or exit through IPO or an exit through acquisition.
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You're going to want to have seven people staked in, in general, between three to seven. Got it. From a risk mitigation standpoint, because if you give someone a larger chunk of equity at very early stages and you're at $5 million, the goal is to grow it to $150 million and beyond. Yeah.
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There's a large level of faith that goes into that. And so what if you reach a point with that person to where they are not pulling the levers fast enough to hit that marker and you feel like you gave away this big chunk and you want to bring on other strategic partners and team members to hit that 150 million milestone in the example. Yeah.
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But this person is not pulling his weight in the sense or her weight of what she promised the expectations up front. At that stage, are you just going to have to go back and have a hard renegotiation conversation? Or how would you approach a scenario like that? So I help a lot of founders have those hard renegotiation conversations. I prefer to preempt that with some sort of a buyback provision in the equity agreement. Yeah.
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where there's some sort of agreed to buyout based on a multiple of EBITDA or a third-party appraisal mechanism. So that way, you know, the divorce, the prenup is there just in case it doesn't work out. Partnerships fail for one of three reasons. One, the partner isn't giving equal value. Two, they're not giving equal time. Or three, they're not giving equal capital. You know, there's some sort of equality issue that breaks up the partnership. Right.
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So as long as we spell out what the contribution of each partner is to the partnership, and we have it pretty tight in our agreements that they are going to contribute that value, then if they don't, the divorce should be predetermined within the agreement of how that goes. So do they get a partial vesting? Is there a buyback provision that gets triggered? Or do they have to walk away if they don't produce the value? Yeah.
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You can write good agreements, and that's what most people don't understand. They think, oh, I don't want to give up equity. The reason why they have so much fear around it is because they don't have the skill to write good agreements.
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Yeah. So what you're telling me is work with a good business attorney and don't draft up a vested equity agreement with Claude. You know, yeah, most business attorneys are not very good at understanding this type of stuff because they've never been in the room. They haven't paid the price. They haven't paid the tuition to know what it's like when you have a person on your cap table that has a ton of equity and they're off on an island somewhere while you're working very hard. Yeah. I'll give you an interesting story. I was mentored by a guy named Paul Allen, the founder of Microsoft. Mm-hmm.
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And Paul Allen was co-founders with Bill Gates. Paul got sick a couple of years into Microsoft and left. And he had undilutable shares. And Paul is out there fighting his cancer. And then Bill takes the company to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. And Paul never has to work a day in his life again. And Bill becomes resentful because of it. Because Bill would prefer that that equity go to people who are –
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actively contributing to the value of the company. Yeah. And so I think that is the single instance of a founder getting equity that they should not have. And Paul was very savvy and he made sure to protect his interests and fight back. But Bill wanted his chunk of that. But Bill could not unseat Paul from that equity because of the way the agreement was written.
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That equity that Paul got is probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars a day. And it was all given to him with less than a few years worth of work. So that's the single incidence that we should all learn from in making sure that we have vesting, we have buyback, we have other provisions to make sure the people ringing the bell with you at the IPO or the people in the trenches with you are the ones ringing the bell. And they're the ones receiving the gain.
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You can also have capped earnings where the equity caps out and it gets returned to the company after the co-founder earns a certain amount. There's plenty of different ways that you can structure it to ensure that you're never sitting back looking at a scenario that you're upset with, where you feel like you made a mistake. And there's plenty of different scenario building exercises that I do with founders that we then turn over to attorneys to document. Got it.
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Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of angles that you could take, which also leads to a lot of mistakes that you can make. And you're saying most business attorneys don't truly have the experience and the savviness to approach these types of agreements and conversations. So as a business owner, outside of Ryan Blair, who else do they go to? How do you learn this and make sure that you're structuring agreements properly?
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Good board members, good venture capitalists, good investors have seen it all. We've seen the problems that many of these different things create in the environment. We've seen companies fail because of this. So I'm going to insist that we document this a certain way if I'm on your board or if I'm your advisor.
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because I've just seen, I've been in the trenches. I've seen the problem go bad. There's certainly some attorneys that have been there too and that are wise because of it. But wisdom generally is obtained through paying the tuition. So the good VC, or in my case, the advisor, the investor, or the partner, I've paid the tuition
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And so I will insist that we document something a certain way because I'm not going to pay the tuition again. An attorney has generally been on the outside of the tuition getting paid. So they're just going to kind of take your orders and maybe they'll push back or maybe they'll make recommendations. But they're not going to make them the same way as a person who's actually paid the tuition.
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Yeah. A lot of good things to chew on there. And a lot of it comes down to leadership as well and really recruiting and structuring these very strategic hires and partnerships in earlier stages of your business. So...
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What are some of the best recruiting frameworks and little tips, tricks, hacks that you found of bringing in incredible talent into your world? Outside of, obviously, we talked about a lot with how you can recruit someone at an early stage of the business who's worth a million dollars a year. You can't pay them a million dollars a year. But how do you even find that person in the first place?
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One, you have to have something interesting, a brand, a idea, a vision. So you have to have something interesting. Talent wants vision. They want opportunity, right? You have to have a big opportunity to get big talent. That's the starting line. Then two, you have to be talent yourself.
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Yeah. If you want a person that we affectionately call an A player, this is the best of the best. You have to be the best of the best. The thing an A player despises the most is working for a B player. If you're an A player and you have a B player boss, it is going to drive you crazy because you have a person who controls your life
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And you're not able to achieve your career objectives because you're sitting underneath somebody who's lazy, lackadaisical, indecisive, doesn't take action, doesn't take risk, is not a good boss. So if you want to attract great talent, become great talent. That's step one. We want to attract them
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And people are attracted to talented people. So I look myself in the mirror and I say, I have to become better. I have to become more efficient, more productive. I have to be better at prioritization, better at decision-making, better at investing, right? Because I want to get even better talent in my door because game recognizes game, right? You know, if you're on a basketball court, you recognize a fellow player that knows how to play and you want to play alongside that person. Mm-hmm.
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So become that person. That's the inner work, the personal development work, the executive work that you have to do. Being a CEO is being a chief executive officer and people want to work with, they want to work with great executive officers, right? So that's step one.
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Now let's talk about once you're really committed to that part of the journey, now you have to have a recruiting process. So I have a full-time recruiter. I'm always talking to talent. We're recruiting people. We also place ads. We're trying to attract people looking, but we're also looking for people that aren't looking. And I see my recruiting operation as my greatest intel operation.
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I gain more insight into the best practices of other companies by way of recruiting talented people. And sometimes I'm recruiting them and it's clear that they're not the right person for my company, but I learn. Every interview I do, I learn something. So as a CEO, I'm always recruiting. It is the funnest thing that I get to do. I get to get on the calls with people. I get to learn about different personalities. I get to say no to people. I get to be very picky.
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with who I work with. And most CEOs are not. They say yes to everyone, and they pay a price for that. And then I get to take the risk and make the bet. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. My recruiting operation is foundational to what I do as a CEO. And it's something that I learned early in my career. Recruiting is everything.
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Yeah, it's such a good insight of how much you can learn from conducting interviews on new positions. And if you're tapping into a different industry or marketing vertical or whatever the case. Yeah.
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And I get to get more skilled at it every time I do an interview. Yeah. So people are like, oh, I have to do an interview with 10 people today. It's going to be such a tough day. Are you kidding me? You're going to become more skilled at interviewing people. You're going to become better at identifying what a person's true values are, where their skills are, where might they be a little dishonest, where might they be a little misleading, where, you know—
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Where are they performative? Who are they authentically? You can become a great interviewer and ultimately learn things about people and refine your skill. And you get to put the reps in through the interviewing process. So if you see it that way and you try to get better and better at interviewing, you'll become great at identifying talent. And then of course, attracting great talent and getting that great talent to do great work with you. Yeah.
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You mentioned you have a full-time recruiter, which is essential of what we're talking about on the recruitment process, bringing in top talent. How early should you bring in a full-time recruiter in the revenue stages of your business? Well, I'm at 65 employees right now, scaling up to about 100 this year. Yeah.
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So I have a full-time recruiter right now because I'm actively looking for about five roles per month, three to five roles per month. So I'm talking to a lot of people. I don't always hire five. Some months I hire two. Some months I might hire three. But I'm recruiting for three to five active roles per month. At about that, you're looking for a full-time recruiter. But we see a lot of people.
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Some recruiters will do 20 roles in a month. I'm not looking for volume hiring. I'm looking to talk to 10 great candidates per role that I hire. Me, I want my team talking to 20, 30 people. I want my team interviewing the best of the best and then making hard decisions. I know my recruiting process is good if we're having a hard time choosing between two or three people. That's when I've done a good job.
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Now, before then, you can get a fractional recruiter, and you can find somebody who's a fractional recruiter, pay them by the role. Don't pay these huge 20%, 25% fees. That's what almost all of them ask for. Yeah, they do. Go find somebody who is a private practice recruiter that only has a few clients that'll do it by the role and do it retained. Yeah.
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Because it takes time. I need to give my recruiter- What do you mean by that? Do it retained? Over six months, we're going to hire these roles because I need to give my recruiter feedback with every interview. I need my recruiter on interviews with me. I need to really work with my recruiter to make sure that we have a chemistry and a style and they know who's going to be a good fit, they know who's not. And it takes a while to work that out. So I would engage a, if I couldn't hire a full-time one, I would engage a fractional recruiter
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over say six months to fill a few roles and then work with them hand in hand, giving them feedback when they send you people that aren't a good fit for you. I have to give even my recruiters to this day, I have to give them constant feedback and I send them the interviews to review and it's like, what do you think...
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went wrong in this interview. What do you think you missed in putting this candidate on the calendar with me? And so I have to sharpen them up and refine them and skill them up as to what I'm looking for. And that's a process that I have to do on an ongoing basis, even with my full-time recruiters, let alone if I'm working with fractional recruiters.
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Yeah. And so when you are sending over an interview to your recruiter for a training opportunity, you're not leading with, hey, this candidate wasn't good for these reasons. You're first asking them, what do you think was missing in this interview? Like what was what was missing the screening process without mentioning any of your own notes first?
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In a recent case, I sent the interview and I said, you know, I'm not sure what you guys saw in this candidate. Watch this interview. Right? Watch this interview and tell me if I'm missing something because I could be just totally wrong. And so I give everyone the opportunity to correct me if I'm wrong here. And they came back in this particular case and they said, you're right, the candidate wasn't prepared. And, you know, and they agreed with me and they closed out the candidate.
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But I was willing to, maybe I missed something or maybe I was, you know, not at my best and maybe their candidate deserved another interview and let's give them another chance because maybe that wasn't their best form. In this case, they concluded that we should close out the candidate, but I would have given the person another shot if they said, hey-
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He showed up a little bit. I didn't give him plenty of notice on the interview. And maybe there's some complications. Let's give him another shot. I would have given him that other shot. But so I'm always seeking feedback to determine if my model is accurate. Because my model of reality can get bugs in it too. And so I want my team to correct me when I'm wrong. Yeah.
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When it comes to providing feedback and training to team members in general, do you follow a specific framework and approach? Obviously, there's variables, but are you just directly sending them the feedback? Are you taking that approach of asking them, like, hey, where do you think this could have been approved first? How do you approach that with your team?
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I'm not often satisfied with anything going on ever. Yeah. But I'm not dissatisfied with them. I just think we could do better. I think there's a level that we've yet to achieve together. We're playing in third gear, and I know there's a fifth gear out there, and I want to get there. I want to get there in every aspect of my business.
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And so I'm not telling them I'm dissatisfied and I'm grateful for them. I'm grateful that they're helping us engineer at the level that we're engineering at. And I want to get to the next level. So I'm looking all the time in every aspect of my business and I'm sending feedback saying, what could we improve? Where are their bottlenecks? Where are their key constraints? And I'm looking at them.
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How do we get this optimized? And I'm running experiments. I'm investing constantly and seeking to shift different aspects of the business, whether it be hiring systems, scaling up. So, you know, that's the nature of my personality because I want to build a more efficient company all the time. And I'm also moving toward conflict. And I call it constructive conflict.
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I want to have conflict around, so I designed a system to have checks and balances. And in those checks and balances, you will have conflict. And in that conflict is an opportunity for us to get better. And so I see conflict and constructive conflict as a gateway to strengthening the muscles of the business. So I'm constantly having conflict
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passionate discussions about disagreements or about things that are ineffective and different ways that we can improve it. And those are the environments that I operate in. That constructive conflict, that constructive disagreement is what is going to create the next level of success in your business. I'm not looking for it to be a friendly, passive environment and a tranquil environment. Right.
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I want to move fast. I want to break things. I want to have conflict. I want to have disagreement. And that's where we emerge as our best. Yeah. You have another framework. Start with love. When you're giving constructive feedback to someone and more so in a group setting, right? Because a lot of people talk about give feedback in private, praise in public. But there's, I believe you may have some differing thoughts on that. I do. Can you tell us more about that?
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Well, if we're on a basketball team and you threw the ball into the stands, would I blow the whistle, stop the game and take you into locker room and say, Logan, you know, I hope you're having a good day. What's going on? Yeah. I'd say, what'd you do? Right? Like I'd blow the whistle and kick you. I'd bench you or send you to the locker. Something would have to happen. Right. So there's a time and place, but sometimes we need to receive criticism publicly. Yeah.
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Especially in remote companies. Yeah, I can't blow the whistle every time the game's playing to give feedback. Now I can give you that feedback in a way that's constructive. So one, I connect you. Two, I try to call you forward to a higher version of yourself, your higher self. I'm not criticizing you. I'm not focused on the who, I'm focused on the what. John Wooden taught me, it's not who's right, it's what's right. So when I blow the whistle, it's about the what, not about the who. And I'll call a person forward, hey, we're better than this.
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I've seen you play better than this. Come on. And because I love my team and they know I want them to play at their highest level that they've ever played at, I have the trust to call them forward and they thank me for it. You know that you have the right team when you call people forward and they thank you for it. If they don't thank you for it, you have ego on your team and you have a team that's not constructed correctly. Yeah.
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So I spend a lot of time constructing my culture. And I spend a lot of time calling people forward. And I give them permission to call me forward too. And they do. Now, so that's, you know, I'm constantly calling people forward. I have a guy on the way in. We're closing out our month right now. He just got off vacation. And he kind of coasted in after vacation.
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I'm on the phone with him. I'm saying, you're coasting. What are you doing, man? I've seen you in fifth gear and I've seen you in neutral and I feel like you're in neutral. And it activated him and he's moving quicker now. And he's like, you're right, I am. I'm moving quicker. I'm in the game. Let's go. Sometimes we need to be called forward. We need to coach to see something we can't see. We need to know when our shot's off. We need to know when we picked up bad habits. We need to know when we're off basis, right? That's what a good CEO does. They coach their team.
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and they call their team forward. They see their team when they're great, and they see their team when they're not great, and they have permission to call their team toward greatness. Yeah, yeah, it's so powerful. What is your thought process? Because a lot of people,
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are on one end of the spectrum of, in this business, we're family. And they're very close, family-oriented, very good friends with everyone they work with in the business or their director of course. And then you have the other side of the spectrum, Elon Musk thinks it's a handicap. You should not be friends with your close executives, your team members. At least I've heard him quoted on that.
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Where do you fall in that spectrum? What are your thoughts on that? In the middle. I'm not on the Elon spectrum where everybody's expendable. He has this mode called demon mode. I don't have demon mode. I don't want demon mode. I want to embody the fruits of the spirit in the work that I do. In Christianity, we have this concept called the fruits of the spirit.
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It means we have to embody love, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, right? So I want to embody the fruits of the Spirit in the work that I'm doing. I want to serve the Lord with joy and excellence. When we're not in excellence, I'm calling them forward. But I want to have joy too. Sometimes a family environment lacks excellence. And I'm not here to serve the Lord. The definition is nepotism.
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Yeah, right? And so I'm not here to serve the Lord with a lack of excellence. I'm here to serve the Lord with excellence. And that means that we do our job and we do it very well and we work hard and we produce great results because I build with excellence. I want excellence. That is the greatest way to serve the Lord. But I don't want demon mode. He can have demon mode. He will pay a price for demon mode. Maybe he hasn't paid it yet, but he will.
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Yeah, that's powerful. And I agree. I've found it's good to be in the middle to where you have a good cultivated relationship of trust with your team, especially the core members who have been there. You know, you want the best for them and the company. But I've heard you use an analogy of,
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A lot of people approach the business as we're a family here versus use the analogy of, no, we're a sports team and we're here to win the Super Bowl. We're here to win the championship. And the starting five may not be the final five in the championship game. And everyone needs to be aware of that. And at the end of the day, the championship is the target.
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Yeah. Now the issue is we make these commitments like, oh, it's, this is a for life. We're going to be at this for life. Yeah. Life changes. I may change. You may change. And so I don't want to set the expectations of the relationship that there's nothing that you could do that would ever, you know, have us not be in business together. There are plenty of things that you could do or I could do that would hinder us from ever doing business together again. Right? Yeah. So let's just be honest with each other.
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that people are just dishonest. Oh, we're a family and yeah, I'll always call you a friend provided you don't steal from me, cheat, betray me, but if you do those things, we're not family, right? And I'm not paying you to be my family. I don't pay for friends and I don't pay for family members. I pay for you to be a professional.
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So outside of work will always be cool as long as, you know, you honor the values that I live by and the values that I require to be in my circle. Inside of work, I have a different set of requirements to be in my circle than outside my work, right? So, you know, here are the requirements to be in my circle inside my work. And for as long as you meet those requirements, we're good. But the moment that you fall out of those requirements, we're not good.
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And I'll give you time to correct. I'll let you know when you're falling out of requirements, when you're not meeting my expectations, I promise you, you'll hear from me and we'll reset expectations frequently. If you breach my trust, you're gonna hear from me. But I have certain requirements and I pay people to be professionals and I expect them to be professionals. I don't pay them to be my friend and I don't pay them to be my family. Yeah, I love that.
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So we've talked about, you know, one to 10 million and more so concising one to three, three to 10. Reinvesting in your team. Don't look at that early stage as your income. You know, have the strategic partnerships, focus on sales, focus on marketing. Any other missing pieces there before we move on to the next journey? Yeah.
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Pay people, hire people, hire great people and pay them well and incentivize them. Your company is the behavior that you tolerate, that you recognize, and that you reprimand. So what behaviors am I tolerating, recognizing, and reprimanding? That's a company. So all you have to do is have great behavior and have great people incentivized to produce great behavior, and you'll have a great company.
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Yeah. Going back to the recruiter as well, whether you have someone full-time or fractional, even if we've had months where we've hired over 30 people in a month and we've had others to where we hire a few or we're optimizing the existing team. So we've had a need since early on of having a full-time recruiter. But another massive benefit that I've seen from that is not only new hires and growing the team and growing the company, but
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but also replacing those who aren't pulling the right. Because when someone doesn't have a strong recruitment arm in their business, they accept mediocrity because they're like, I'm so busy. I have to go and make another job post and do all these interviews myself. And a lot of time in earlier stage businesses is the founder who's doing, making the job post, screening the candidates, doing the interviews. And that holds them back. I've made this mistake multiple times from firing or replacing someone
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who should have been replaced right away and end up staying on the team for six months, a year plus. What are your thoughts on it? I just see that as one of the biggest, most common mistakes, especially in this phase of the one to 10 million range. The reason why I sleep well at night is I know that I have many options when it comes to talent. Yeah.
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If I didn't have any options, it's like negotiating with terrorists or being held hostage, right? You don't have options. So I have options. If somebody wants to leave, obviously I'll fight to keep them if they're good. If they're not good, I just get to replace them with someone better.
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So you're doing me a favor if you're leaving versus if I don't have recruiting or if it's a process that I start and stop all the time, then they have leverage over me. So for as long as I can recruit great talented people, I can upskill, I can increase my talent density, I can work with even better people if people leave. And to your point,
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Yes, if somebody's failing to perform, I can have them replaced pretty quickly. And that gives me the security that I need as a founder to scale my company. It's a major strength of business. Yeah. The number one thing that I look for, I'm curious if you have more insight on this, is when it comes to should this person be replaced or not, is rate of progress. And they need to have an extremely fast rate of progress to where...
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Everyone's going to make mistakes, but if you see them improving at a rapid pace, they take feedback. They're not making the same mistakes again. And when you assign tasks, they're resourceful, they do a good job at it. Then in my mind, they have a long-term position with us versus if they're making repeated mistakes. You're not seeing progress at a fast rate. There's hand-holding on every step of the way, lack of resourcefulness.
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Do you have a better metric or what are your thoughts on when to replace someone and what to look for of training versus this person needs to be replaced? Well, if I'm thinking about them a lot, you know, like if they're an open loop in my life and if they're a decision that I'm contemplating constantly, there's something going on there. There's an issue. I need to move toward that. I need to have a conversation with them.
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That's one. You know, if I'm spending too much time thinking about this person, too much time having to deal with this person for the wrong reasons, not the right reasons, that's an indicator that there's something out of alignment there. That's one. Two, you know, I ask myself, what's their desire level?
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You know, are they learning? Are they growing? As you said, rate of progress. What's their capacity? Can I give them more? I often share that I have five decisions when it relates to personnel in a company. Do I hire above them, meaning I have to hire their boss?
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Do I hire below them, meaning I'm going to reinforce and invest in their leadership? Do I hire beside them, meaning do I split their role because they're underwater and I need to split their role and duplicate expenses, which is not always a good thing? Do I re-roll them, meaning I take them out of the role they're in and give them a new role, or do I let them go?
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So those are the five decisions I have to make at any given time with regard to my personnel. I invite my team. I say, if you ever want to know where you're at within my five decisions, I'm happy to share with you. Am I thinking about hiring your new boss because I've come to the decision that I can't work with you to the degree that I need to? And I can't grow you to the way that I'd like to. And you're not a person that I would allocate time to as a direct report.
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Or am I thinking about reinforcing your leadership and investing in you? The easiest thing for me to do is invest in you. I'd rather do that than hire a new person, split your role, re-roll you, or let you go. So I want to invest in my team members, but you got to earn that investment. Yeah, I love that.
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Now I want to dive into 10 to 100 million. Obviously, huge gap there. Yeah. But we have limited time. So if we're going to make it concise, what are some of the biggest levers to pull for that journey?
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10 to 100 million, you need a financial model. You need to be financially model-driven. You're flying the plane from zero to 10 million. You can fly it by sight. You're looking out the window, clear day, easy to fly the plane. At $100 million, you're flying by instruments. Those are your KPIs, your dashboards, your processes, your financial model, your forecasting, your cash flow forecasting.
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I have a financial model where I can drop a variable in there. You said, Ryan, what if Altricall is at $250 million this time next year? I could put 250 in there. I can tell you exactly how many people I'll have to hire in every aspect of my company to be able to generate that amount of revenue. And then I can look at the hiring plan in advance of when the hire is needed because it kicks out the hires in advance because it takes us time to hire.
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to onboard. I also have my attrition model built in there. I have my stick rate built in there on my hiring plan. And I can tell you based on my current reality and model now, exactly who I'd have to hire and when in order for me to achieve that plan, including every unit economic, every key driver of the business is going to move up and the variables are going to move up. And then I can tell you, is that a reality that I could, you know, I can, I can live with.
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Is that growing too fast? Is that growing too slow? Obviously that would be very fast. So you're flying the plane on instruments to get to a hundred million. And you got to learn how to run, if you're using the pilot analogy, you got to get your commercial pilot's license to be able to fly that a hundred million dollar plane, right? So you really have to upskill. You have to become very competent. You have to surround yourself with very intelligent people in various practice areas.
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in finance, in AI, in IT, in recruiting. And those are just the fundamentals, sales, marketing, and so forth. And then as well as in the industry-specific areas that you're serving, you need to have very competent people running each of those practice areas.
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Yeah. In my experience, that's a unanimous answer for everyone I've spoken to who has grown a business to multi-figures and beyond. You need clear data integrity and tracking. A lot of founders can, based on intuition, shoot from the hip and scale a business to 10 million, maybe up to 20 million. But at some point you hit a plateau and you don't know where your focus needs to go. A challenge is first data integrity, making sure that the data that you have is
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And then second, actually executing and building out these dashboards. Are there some key hires that you've made? And what are the titles of those positions? When someone's in that stage, how do you start to take those steps to make that happen? Because I knew I was building a billion-dollar company, I hired in advance everyone I possibly could before I needed them.
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I build capacity before I need it. I don't want to build it after I need it because you'll never scale if you're building in arrears. You have to build in advance to scale. So I built out my IT department. I have an IT department of very talented PhDs and data scientists in the subject of AI and data science. A team of about nine engineers right now.
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and they're brilliant. I built that team way in advance of us scaling to a hundred million. I'm very engineering centric in the way I build companies. And so I have that team in place. I brought on my marketing team last year, around this time I started investing in very talented marketing people.
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Every week we're implementing on iterating on our dashboards and my financial operations team. I have a couple of people in that area of the business operating, building financial models, cash flow models, you know, making sure to keep that tight, running my payroll. You know, my financial discipline is very strong. And, you know, I'm building that capacity at all times in advance of when I need it. I'm never building it in arrears of when I need it.
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When it comes to your data scientists, the people that software engineers, very savvy AI who are building these dashboards and these models for you, are you sourcing overseas? Have you found some talent pools out there that have really been successful for you?
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Yeah, I like to hire U.S. talent that will lead overseas talent. Yeah. I like to have people that are going to be up the same hours as I am, speaking the same language, living in the same problem set that I am. You have to live in the problem. So my CTO right now,
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I could call him up 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I could say, let's go to war. And I love this guy, and we'll go to war together. And I'll go to war with him. You know, God willing, he's a young man. For the next 50 years, we'll be going to war, building the best business we possibly can together. So...
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I, you know, I have, I need soulmates in my business. I have my financial soulmate. I have my technology soulmate. I have my sales soulmate, my marketing soulmate, my coaching soulmate. These are people that I'm connected to, that I care about, that I need. You know, I have a team in place. So it took me a while to build the team that I have now. And there's some key hires that I need to round out the team with, but I have largely the foundational team built to get us to a couple hundred million dollars.
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Yeah. We've gotten to the point to where we now have department heads for all of our divisions and directors. And all of my direct reports are directors and department heads. And it's the most fun phase of business that I've been in. Yeah. It starts to... When you go back to people...
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business owners hating to manage people and hating to manage teams. One is they have the wrong people to, in my experience, they're, they're not the proper leader. And three, they haven't scaled to, to have true executives and directors who are their direct reports yet, which is where it gets really fun.
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Yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs come to me because I do free coaching calls with entrepreneurs. It's the way I get to meet great entrepreneurs. And a lot of them come to me and they'll say, I'm running a $20 million company. Why would I want to have a $100 million company? It seems like more work, more pain. It's much more fun running a $100 million company than it is running a $10 million company. $10 million, you might be making a little bit of money,
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You got a whole lot of problems at 10 million. At 100 million, you have great competent executives. You get to do meaningful work. You get to be in awe of the brilliance that you're surrounded by, provided you attract great talent. You pay them well, of course, and you have a great culture. The $100 million, it's a lot of fun. You can wake up and say, let's go buy a company today. Yeah.
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And, you know, work on fun projects. Or you can wake up and say, you know, let's re-engineer, you know, a new app or a new processor. You know, let's scale. Let's do this. Let's do that. You can't do that when you're running a $10 million company. You're much more constrained at $10 million on a talent level than you are at, say, $100 million. I can imagine. I think it's a silly question. Why should I go to $100 million? Like, why would you not?
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Well, they think that it comes with more, it does come with more stress. If you don't have the means to carry the burden of that size of team and that size of responsibility, it will bury you literally in stress. So you have to rise the occasion. Most people don't realize that you can grow your ability to handle the stress if you have the right spiritual practices and personal growth practices and mindset and philosophy in place
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you will grow your vessel in advance of your business. So it doesn't become more stressful as it gets bigger. It actually becomes less stressful as it gets bigger. But if you're trying to grow your vessel in arrears of your business, it's very stressful. So you wanna grow in advance of your business. That's why I have five coaches that I work with on a weekly basis to grow me in advance of my business. I love that. It's a really great take.
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with the having cleared dashboards data for this journey of scale, it's also very easy to be overwhelmed by data. And I've heard some, like what we do is we have a CEO dashboard that we look at every, every week and then ongoing through the week as well. And we have three main KPIs per department to keep more simplicity of what we found to be the most important gauges on the optics of,
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How do you approach, do you have a structure around, what is really important to look at? Because there are so many data points that you could be paying attention to in your business. So how do you simplify that? Well, I look at the overall health of the business, but then I have great people running their respective areas. So I'm not paying too much attention to those areas. We review them on a weekly basis. And so on a weekly basis, I touch on every area of the business.
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On a daily basis, I'm looking at the areas that matter the most. So where's the biggest problem in the company or where's the biggest opportunity? And every day I'm working in those areas. It could be argued that focus is the most important part of scaling a business to any target that you have. How do you decide what to focus on?
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Well, the initiatives that are already underway that have yet to be fully executed and implemented are number one. The business that you're in today should get 80% of the focus. 20% should go into the business that you're building. So what business am I building for tomorrow, for next year, new products, new team, new markets, new countries, whatever. That's the business I'm building. The business I'm in today should always have 80% of my focus.
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I love that. And a lot of founders get that wrong. They start getting good and then they put 80% of their focus in the business that they're building. And then the business that they're in today falls apart. Yeah. I see that happen all the time. Yeah. How do you know if you are solving the biggest problem? The biggest problem is generally tied to revenue or profitability.
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So I like to assign a business value to everything that I do. Every problem has a value to it. So is this $100,000 problem, $500,000 problem, $5 million problem, or the equivalent of an opportunity? And then I look at the resource requirements and the time requirements to obtain the value, and I go after the lowest hanging fruit first.
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the highest value with the least resource requirements in the least amount of time. So that's how I rank my priorities. I'm capturing business value every day and I'm capturing the easiest business value to capture every day. And then I'm working on the harder business value over long-term initiatives. But every day I'm going after the quickest wins. Yeah. So now we're going to transition into some two final segments, a little bit more rapid fire areas. First is going to be,
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We're gonna go through a few questions based on some of your top performing content on socials about topics of yours that people found really engaging. One would be, what are the top three habits that made you a multimillionaire? Faith.
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Resilience, I mean, I don't know if those would be habits. Faith, competitiveness, I guess that's a habit. I want to win, I hate losing, I love winning. I don't like losing, I don't like knowing that I could have won the game and I didn't win the game. So faith, competitiveness, and of course, process.
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Engineering, you know, a business is an ecosystem. It is a series of incentives and it's an economic system that you're building. And so I'm always engineering and improving my systems. Yeah. Yeah.
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Another one you mentioned is financial discipline. Yeah, which is part of the system. Right. So my system is a financial system. It's an economic system. And then the discipline, yeah, and how I run that. But finance is the overall health metrics of the system. If you only had $100 and you wanted to turn it into $100,000, what would you invest that $100 into? Books.
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What kind of books? Business books. I've read every business book I get my hands on. And a book is a more disciplined way of consuming content, by the way, than going on YouTube. I like YouTube. I like watching stuff too. But when you actually buy a book and you read it and you take notes and you write up actions from it, it's a different process than audio books or YouTube videos. So I would buy books.
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Are you, you love to read? Are you an audio book guy? Do you like to do both? How do you read? I love to read, but I also, I read every day. These are all aptitudes. So you have to have a reading aptitude. You have to have a listening aptitude and a watching aptitude. And you need to make sure you're working on all of your faculties.
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human beings have unique faculties and if you don't read you lose the skill of reading so you know uh you have to continue doing that and i do it every morning first thing in the morning every morning first thing in the morning do you have a set time that you like 30 minutes i wake up prior to sunrise read the bible every single morning love that um okay what is spiritual warfare
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what isn't spiritual warfare? Spiritual warfare is there's a negative energy and there's a positive energy. And the negative energy is trying to stop you from receiving and sharing positive energy. And spiritual warfare is addiction, lust,
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greed, envy, comparison, jealousy. It is all the negative lower vibrational energies. And then the positive force is love, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, peace, patience, kindness, the fruits of the spirit. And so spiritual warfare is trying to get you out of the fruits
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And so the enemy is going to try to stop you from receiving the fruits and from embodying the fruits and from sharing the fruits. And that's the spiritual warfare that we are all in. And the reason why I said what isn't is I'm under attack every day, as are you. All of us are. And the enemy is clever and he is tricky and he will knock you off your path. And we're all under attack at all times.
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I've gone a little further down the road. I've overcome some of my major vices, most all of them, but he still finds a way. He's very tricky. He still tries to find a way to get me doubting myself, doubting my faith, or get me in greed or in ego or in comparison, and he's very tricky, especially in the material world and the modern world that we live in. What are the biggest and trickiest negative energies of spiritual warfare that most people don't realize?
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Well, the ones that they don't realize is the enemy will get you to pray for a prayer that has already been answered. If only I had a great team. If only I had a great company. We already have a great company. So he'll get you stuck in a loop. It's a negative loop pattern. And the dark will pull you in. And the key is you have to shut it down or you have to turn it around. Shut it down. I just say, I'm not open for business. Yeah.
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If he's got me doubting myself, not open for business. Or I turn it around. I say, thank you. Give the devil his due. I say, how do I take that negative and turn it positive? So if something comes my way that I can see the enemy's behind, I'm going to try to flip that negative into positive. And in doing so, I gain the skill and the character necessary to defeat that approach. He's going to find a new approach the next day. He's going to look for cracks in your armor all the time.
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skillfully respond to each attack and gain the skill and the character so that I become immune from that attack. And then I move on and he tries to challenge the next level. At every level, there's a new devil. As you ascend to the next level, you will have a new devil.
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When I have those minimizing thoughts, those fear-based thoughts come up, I minimize them myself and think, I'm like, that's a stupid thought. Or like, that's impossible. And I just move on with my day. When I minimize it, it helps me move past it. I kind of laugh at the thought. And then, you know, think better.
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Yeah, we all have a lower self and a higher self. And we all have a negative force that's trying to take us down. And we have to pay attention to when this is just the lower version of myself or when this is an actual attack. And we have to make sure that we don't let the dark pull us in.
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There's an opponent out there, and that opponent is trying to stop you from achieving your highest level of sharing and purpose and being activated in your God-giving calling. And that's part of the system. They all are one system. That's what people don't understand.
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When Job went through all of the tribulation he went through, God and the devil were talking about Job, and God permitted the devil to test Job. And so it's one system.
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And so you have to realize that the dark and the light are all one system. And I have to know that both of them are part of it, and I'm going to be tested and challenged all the time. But in the test and in the challenge is a piece of light. God doesn't give you the challenge without giving you the care package to address the challenge. So if all of a sudden something crushes me, something happened the other day that knocked me down, knocked the wind out of me,
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in that challenge came the exact ingredients the new energy the new level the new perspective comes with the package all i have to do is extract the lesson extract the wisdom and extract the energy from it and then uh learn the lesson from the negative part of it and then move on and and every challenge is a blessing it is not a curse yeah yeah i fully agree have you listened to the
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I have not. I'm familiar with it, but I haven't listened to it. It's incredible. The Founders Podcast is, he reads biographies and summarizes them in very concise, but lesson-oriented ways. 45, 60-minute episodes of history's greatest founders and entrepreneurs, who many of them have built multi-billion dollar companies throughout history. And one of the number one takeaways that I got from it is listening to the challenges that they had to persevere through. Yeah.
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And it completely minimizes any challenges that I've dealt with yet in many of those instances. And also understanding the growth that came by persevering through that challenge on the other end of it. And a lot of them have learned to get excited about challenge. And that was one of the biggest lessons and takeaways that I had as well is now when I see a challenge, I get excited for the opportunity to grow from it.
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for the opportunity of the lesson that's going to come. And I know that every time that you push through, you're in a much better spot on the other end. And it turns it into more of a game in a way. I gave a plan mine as well. I always say, let's dance. I'm going to dance with my challenges. I greet the challenges my friend. Winston Churchill has a quote, and that is, never let a good crisis go to waste.
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So every one of these things is an opportunity, as you just pointed out. But that is the mindset that you have to have because they're coming your way. Yeah. Yeah. I've lived through the Great Recession. I've lived through COVID, of course, in business. There's going to be the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Life is going to deal you hard blows. If you have the mindset to convert the negative into positive, you're going to do great in life.
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Yeah. Yeah. It's a guarantee. I love that. Okay. Next question. You have a teenage son. What is the most difficult thing and what is the best thing about raising a teenage son?
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Uh, most difficult thing is I'm not cool anymore. All right. I, I, we used to be, you know, he used to look up to me. I was the hero. And what age did that start to start? Uh, about 16 years old, 15, 16 years old. Now at 17, I'm really not cool. I look forward to the day when dad becomes cool again. Yeah.
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Yeah. And then what's been the best thing about raising a teenage son? And I love my son. I get to know love in ways that I've never dreamed possible. I get to do it right. My dad didn't do it right. So I get to break the cycle and give him the love that I wish I would have received and be the father to him that I wish I would have had. And I love him. He's my everything. And I have a daughter on the way. Yeah.
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She's due in August, and I can't wait to get to know what it's like to love a daughter. That's such a blessing. That's my goal. We just had a newborn son. I'm like, a boy, girl, perfect world. You know, God plans. Yeah, God willing. Well, I'll have many more kids. I still got a lot in me. That's exciting. I want to have as big a family as I possibly can have. And, you know, I had a near-death experience during COVID. I got really sick.
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And in that process, I realized if I had died right there, I have failed to achieve my soul's purpose. I want to leave a family behind, and I want to leave the wisdom that I've been so blessed to receive from my mentors into the hands of the people that I love the most, my family.
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Yeah, we need more Ryan Blairs in the world too. So I say- God willing, I will be able. I'm duplicating many leader and that's, ultimately I'm transferring everything I can to other leaders. I give people every piece of wisdom I have, my job is to hand it to you and to everyone I possibly can. So that's it. I'm trying to give it all away while I'm alive. Yeah. What makes you really believe there is a God?
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I've had interventions. I've had moments where God showed up.
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There was a time when I was a kid, I was in a gang. The cops raided this house. I crawled underneath the bed. Cops were walking around. They didn't look underneath the mattress. I was praying. Got out. I thought, wow, God saved me from that. Bunch of people went to jail. Met up with some friends afterward. One of my friends says, hey, let's get in the car. Let's go do a drive-by.
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a little voice says, you're not getting in that car. I didn't get in the car. All those guys go to jail. There's plenty of time where I was about to make a life or death decision and God intervened. And it's happened many times in my life. So I have a very close relationship with God. He has saved me when I thought I was unsavable. And I owe my life to God. I have...
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I wouldn't be alive without him. Yeah. There's a lot of stories like that through history where I believe those are the precipice points that have created some of the greatest leaders in history, some of God's greatest servants. I'm watching a documentary about George Washington on Netflix right now. And when the U.S. were still British colonies, this was in the 1750s,
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He was leading one of his first troops of about 1,000 British soldiers. They came in contact with the French. They were ambushed, and it was a massacre. The French massacred the British. A lot of death. Every commander that was a part of the troops was killed or injured, except for George Washington. He had four bullet holes through his... They had a cape on the clothing that they would wear,
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but he was unscathed and unbruised. And he felt that that was divine intervention and that God helped him and he was called for a bigger purpose. And that led a lot of the decisions that he made from then on in his life. And you hear a lot of stories like that. Our founding fathers, many of them were deeply rooted in their faith and that's why we have such a great country. I'm a patriot. I want to support our country to the best of my ability because of the faith that founded our country.
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Okay, and now we have our final five closing questions. So first, what's been the most impactful tactical move that you've implemented in your business this year? Oh, this year? Yeah.
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I'd just say working with my leadership, working hand in hand with my leadership every single day. That, now it's a matter of me working with them, problem solving with them, prioritizing with them, working hand in hand every day.
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It's a good reminder that so much of it is in the repetition and keeping focus on the North Star because entrepreneurs love the shiny objects, love the new versus doing more and better. Yeah. What's in front of them that's already working. Yeah. Yeah.
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Making incremental progress in each of my leaders' practice areas is what has been the biggest game changer this year. You know, we have a working business model. It's scaling. It's providing a lot of value to our customers. We just need to get better at our core business. Every day, get better at the core business. Get better at the core. Love it. What's your favorite sales technique that has made you the most money in your career? Asking for the order. Yeah.
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You know, in fundraising, I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars fundraising. And, you know, there's nothing more exhilarating than sitting across the table from a very sophisticated person and having them give you $10 million. And that's high ticket. You know, a lot of people on high ticket, they don't know what real high ticket is. High ticket. It's not $10,000. Yeah. High ticket is not $10,000. High ticket is $10 million. Yeah. And that's a lot of fun. So just asking for the close. Yeah.
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Well, you know, you have to do the entire process, but the part where you have enough conviction to look a person across the eyes or across the table and say in the eyes, I want you to give me $10 million to do this. And then you shut up and you wait for the response. And sometimes they say yes. And when they do, there's nothing like it. Yeah. Key word you said is conviction as well. It's the underlying trait amongst the most successful salespeople.
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Yes. Well, in fundraising in particular, I have conviction that I'm going to get them a return on that investment, and they have a sense for that. Yeah. What book has impacted your career the most? The Bible. You said that you read the Bible every morning. Yep. Are there specific chapters that you find yourself referring back to the most? Yeah.
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Well, I read it linearly, start to finish, in sequence every morning. So I don't read the whole Bible every morning, of course, but it took me seven months to read it most recently. And every journey where I start out to read, I start all over again at the beginning and I reread it.
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And every journey could be, it could be seven months. It could be six months next time. It could be nine months. It could be 13. I'm not counting the amount of months. It just depends upon how much I'm called to read in the season I'm in. And I read as much as my cup can hold. And then I set it down and I get to work, you know, from there. But I read it sequentially because I gain new perspective every time I read it. Yeah.
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So I'm reading it sequentially. I'm not jumping around. I'm reading it the way that it was written. And I read it, you know, minimum of one chapter a day, many days, far more than that every day. Yeah. And every time you reread, you're in a different chapter in your own life too. Yeah. And so everything's going to resonate in a different light. Final question for the interview. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever received?
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Well, the best piece of advice from a book, a mentor, a person I've met,
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I've gotten thousands of pieces of wonderful advice. The best piece of advice I've ever received was from my mother. She said, you can do anything that you set your mind to. And she really believed that. She really believed that her crazy son was a juvenile delinquent who...
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went to continuation high school, who was in the Nadjuna Hall, had some sort of gifts that he could do something. And she just always would tell me, you can do anything you set your mind to. And that was the foundation of my belief. And I still have that belief to this day. And my mother gave me that piece of advice. And so that would be the best singular piece of advice that was ever given to me.
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Ryan, you're incredible. Your words are powerful. Your wisdom, I believe, is going to impact generations between the leaders that you're developing as well. Thank you. I appreciate you coming on the show. And where can people find you? Where can they learn more from you? You go to altercall.com, A-L-T-E-R-C-A-L-L.T-O-M. Or if you want to have a personal connection, find me on Instagram. I'm at RealRyanBlair on Instagram. And if you DM me, we can connect there too.
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Incredible. Check them out. Thanks so much, Ryan, for coming on the show. Thank you, Logan. It was an honor and I loved it. Awesome. Thank you. If you got value from this interview, it would be a huge support if you subscribe to the channel to also make sure that you're tapped in for the future interviews coming out soon. Let's grow together and I'll see you in the next one.