by Ryan Blair
I’ll never forget the day I pulled up to the gates of Robert’s beautiful, upscale neighborhood in my ’78 Toyota Corolla station wagon. One of the security guards recognized me; his name was Terry, and he ran one of the few legitimate businesses in my old neighborhood. We’d bring him our recyclables to weigh, then he’d give us a voucher for the supermarket.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Terry grumbled at me as I slowed my car. I told him I lived there now. “Get the hell out of here! You don’t live here,” he said.
I grinned, assured him that I really did live there, and then added, “You work for me now.” He laughed. As he waved me through the gate, I realized just how much my entire life had changed.
Looking around me, I started to observe how people lived—not when they were burglarizing cars for a living, and not when they were only pretending to have a lot of disposable income, but how people who were legitimately wealthy lived. I realized that it all came down to the work they put into themselves and their professions. I realized they had a system, too. A system of wealth that was unlike the system that ran the streets.
One time I was driving my stepdad’s car to get it washed, and an older gentleman approached me and asked casually, “So what do you do?” I guess he thought I was a celebrity or an athlete to have a car like that as a teenager. And with that experience, and others that followed, I got to observe how society attaches labels to you. I started wearing polo shirts and dressing nicely. Girls at school were suddenly allowed to date me, whereas before I’d been off-limits to most of the “nice” girls. No one seemed to know, or care, that he hadn’t raised me from birth. I acted like the son of Robert Hunt, a very successful real estate entrepreneur, and I worked for him.
To me, that really was what mattered—the idea that I worked for him—that even as a teenager I was a professional. Reaching back to my childhood, before the gangs and the violence and the drugs, I found the work ethic my father had instilled in me, and I dusted it off.
My first job with Robert was running errands and doing general chores around the office. After a while, he gave me other tasks, the main one being the service of eviction notices on families who weren’t paying their rent (three-day notices ordering tenants to pay rent or quit the property) and foreclosure notices.
For some people, throwing families out of their houses might seem kind of harsh, but I saw things differently.
People were falling behind on their payments either because they’d gotten into properties greater than what they could afford or because they’d made bad spending decisions and chose to fund the illusion of prosperity rather than meet their real-life obligations. And it wasn’t just some faceless corporation that got stuck paying for their mistakes, it was Robert—my mentor. When someone didn’t pay the rent for three months, that deficit didn’t just disappear. It came out of Robert’s pocket. So, in essence, each delinquent tenant was passively robbing him.
I took my job seriously. I wanted every family to have a fair chance to get caught up on their payments or to find a new place to live, so I made sure I delivered every notice promptly and respectfully. Many people got their affairs in order and nothing further came of it. Others simply refused to leave, and at that point, my job was to make them move.
During this time, I was eighteen years old, six foot three, and weighed 240 pounds; and I’d spent a lot of time in rough company. I never used physical force with my job. Robert wouldn’t have tolerated that. I did cut an imposing figure, though, and I wanted to prove myself not only to my stepdad, but also to myself. Each time I’d pull up to a house, I’d brace myself for a confrontation. People talk about the significance of sweat equity when they were first starting out. I know a thing or two about it—I had literal sweat equity trickling down my back and dripping down my forehead, making my eyes sting.
Robert Hunt, my stepdad, he was a stickler, but he taught me so much that it wasn’t long before my hard work paid off and I left his company because I got offered a job. The company was called Logix, and I started out as a customer service representative answering about 120 inbound telephone calls a day. Starting salaries were $6 per hour, and we’d get a small bonus every time we saved an account or got someone to upgrade. In that call center I learned a lot. I saw the turnover, the hirings and firings, and the training process. I saw a system.
Logix had a data center in the same building that was designed to support its call center downstairs. I’d always wanted to work there because I loved computers, so one day I asked if I could cover a swing shift for the data center. The experience was a chance for me to bond with the manager of the group, and he offered to transfer me from the call center to the data center.
I made the switch, got a raise to $6.50 per hour, and learned how to change the backup tapes and reboot computers if they went down—just basic stuff. But I didn’t see it as menial; I saw it as a tremendous opportunity to learn how the company worked on a number of different levels. I was like a sponge, reading every book on computer science I could find and immersing myself in the subject.
In the meantime, I also started going to the community college because Robert Hunt had a rule that if I lived underneath his roof, I had to complete high school, go to college, and get a job. I didn’t want to work for him anymore because I wanted to venture out on my own into the field of computers, so I took it upon myself to learn every last thing I could from classes, books and articles, and from talking to experts.
Because of my ability to hustle and my nothing-to-lose attitude, I was soon the lead data-center technician. Next, I was made the supervisor of the center, and then I was made the manager. Finally, at the age of twenty and after only about two years with Logix, I was made a vice president. I went from making $6 an hour to more than $100,000 a year. I will always be indebted to Keith Howington, the CEO of Logix, for giving me opportunity and mentorship at Logix. He taught me many lessons that I apply to this day.
But at that point, I realized that I could start my own company. All it took was a few indispensable ingredients: an idea, hard work, and dedication. Once I figured that out, I had no choice but to go to Keith and tell him I was going to start my own company. He wasn’t too happy about that because he needed me to finish the development of a critical piece of software for a subsidiary we’d just acquired. And I couldn’t care less about his happiness, because I was obsessed with my future as an entrepreneur. In the end he became my business partner, and we were both happy.
So what was the point of dedicating an entire chapter to explaining my life before I became an entrepreneur? There are several reasons.
First, I want to be honest. I don’t have a sterling past. Chances are you’re coming from your own set of damages and bad experiences. Use those to propel yourself to better things. Learn from them. If I can make it—starting out as a street kid and ending up as a stable citizen who enjoys financial success—anyone can.
Second, I had people who were willing to mentor me, to give me another chance, and to let me prove myself. Don’t be too proud to accept help. That’s going to be one of the most important aspects of growing your business, and you need to be okay with it early on.
Finally, I want to emphasize that we are not defined by our circumstances. Whatever situation you might find yourself in, it’s easy to allow it to become the lens through which you define yourself. You are stronger than whatever circumstances you’re facing. Remember that with the proper mind-set, potential is the one power you always have, and the mind-set that propelled me forward came from having nothing to lose.
2
THE NOTHING-TO-LOSE MIND-SET
There is nothing more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose. Usually a series of losses will trigger it. You might have gotten laid off, or lost your home, or are going through a messy divorce. You may have started a business and failed. Maybe you’ve had to couch-surf for the first time since you were in your twenties. After a combination of events like these, one after the other, you realize one day that
you’re at the bottom.
This is where a nothing-to-lose mind-set comes from.
Like an animal backed into a corner, your survival instincts kick in. Now, there are two types of people. There is the type who will ignore his instincts and cower and submit. This is a domesticated person, and with enough pressure, he is the one who will take a route to a lesser existence, give up, or commit suicide. Then there is the type who, no matter how desperate the circumstances, obeys his instincts and fights. And just like that animal backed into the corner, there is nothing more dangerous.
I got arrested about ten times when I was younger. I only served time twice and, fortunately, I was never tried as an adult. When I went to Juvenile Hall the first time, I was a skinny white kid, so I had to learn quickly about people with nothing to lose. The new guys always got tested to see how tough or domesticated they really were. What would happen if I bumped into him? Or better yet, what would happen if I walked over and asked him for his milk during lunch? Was he going to jump up and fight? Or was he going to hand it to me and say he didn’t want it?
When you’re in jail, it soon becomes obvious who is the real deal and who is not. And you know that if that kid lets you take his milk, he isn’t as tough as he seems. Soon you’ll be taking his milk every day. And so will everyone else.
The same principle applies to business. A lot of people come into my office with a front. They talk, and talk, and talk. And I test them. I start by asking for specific names, people they’ve worked with. Or I’ll ask a business-model question that only the real deal would know. You had millions in sales, huh? So what was your cost of goods sold? What type of EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) did you have? Where’d you bank? Wells Fargo? So were you with the private bank at Wells Fargo? Who’s your rep over there?
If the person can’t answer these types of questions in detail, he is either a complete scam, or he wasn’t the person actually responsible for the success of the business he’s referencing. You’ll find a business success has a thousand fathers, but I want to deal with the person who knows what it takes to win: the founding father, not the other 999.
When you’re on the streets, you learn to read people for a living. You’re always thinking, Is this person going to stab me in the back? Rat me out? Set me up? Tell people where I live? Is my mother going to get hurt? Will I go to jail because of this person?
When you’ve played the game with stakes as high as those, weeding out people who are fronting is instinctive. I didn’t make up these behaviors—I know them for a fact because every situation I’ve survived and the many millions I’ve made came with a lot of stolen milk.
Now those street smarts and my nothing-to-lose mind-set are my greatest assets. And they can be yours, too. We’ll be looking at assets in a later chapter, but if you’ve got your back in a corner and you choose to fight, that choice is going to work more to your advantage than anything else could.
First, you have to determine whether or not you’re in a nothing-to-lose situation. Ask yourself, do you go to work every day afraid that you’re going to lose your job? If you had to go into your boss’s office right now and ask for a vacation, would you be able to do it? Are you dodging bill collectors? Do you live paycheck to paycheck? Do you feel as if you’re sacrificing the best of your successes for someone else to take the credit?
At the coffeepot at work or at home around the dinner table, do you talk about how shitty your job is? If the answer is no, and you’re happy—then congratulations. Maybe now isn’t the right time to strike out on your own. But if the answer is yes, then there is no better time to stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate employees. I’m actually an employee of the company I created, but the mind-set I have is that of an entrepreneur. And the biggest heroes in my company are the entrepreneurially minded employees. They treat the company as their own. You can also be an entrepreneur without any employees at all (I’m envious of you) as a consultant or with your own home-based business. But if you’re going to get anything from this book, know first that the only thing you can’t be is just an employee, that is, someone who is barely getting by every day, not pushing himself and not investing himself.
It’s time to listen to those instincts and start fighting as if you have nothing to lose.
Some of you reading this are judging me and saying, Why should I listen to him when he’s made bad decisions in his life? For those of you having a hard time getting over the fact that I haven’t had a squeakyclean life, I say take any middle-class kid whose family is in shambles—torn apart by drug addiction and abuse—throw him into a gang-infested neighborhood when all he wants is a male role model, and he will find males to follow but they won’t be role models. That’s why I’ve made bad decisions, but that’s also how I got my nothing-to-lose mind-set. And those things you are judging—my poor decisions—those are my assets.
You can judge me all day long. You can judge my bank statements, you can judge the cars I drive, the art on my walls, and the homes I own. Like it or not, these are the rewards created by a person who had nothing to lose. And now I’ll share with you how I went from having nothing to lose to having tens of millions to lose.
But a mind-set isn’t enough; you’re going to need to get smart—book smart and street smart—because there are going to be a lot of people trying to steal your milk. Read on.
3
HUSTLERS, CHARLATANS, . . . AND TONY ROBBINS
In February 2010 I was invited by Stuart Johnson, the owner of Success magazine, to attend an event dedicated to Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn is considered one of the first people in the personal growth industry to take commonsense wisdom and successfully market it, and he was a man I greatly respected and admired. He’d just passed away, and all the best of the best were there to celebrate a retrospective of his work. The keynote speakers included Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Les Brown, Dr. Denis Waitley, and Mark Victor Hansen—men who have collectively sold probably about a billion books over the span of their careers.
There were around two thousand people in the audience, all excited to see these legends pay homage to the godfather of the industry. As I watched each one of these men get up there and try to give the greatest performance of their lives, I had an epiphany. It felt as if I were watching the end of an era. I thought, This must have been what it was like when my parents saw the end of their parents’ music. You know how songs used to be all dreamy about good times and happy days, when musicians sang the music you wanted to hear, not the music their souls needed to release?
And honestly, this was my parents’ music. My stepdad used to play Tony Robbins tapes, and go to fire-walking seminars. They believed that if you bought these books and listened to these messages, you would be a better person. Not to say there isn’t truth in that statement, but we all know that what these motivational speakers were really selling was the façade of a perfect life, good times and happy days—a theatrical representation of life instead of the reality.
I kept asking myself, Why do I have to listen to my parents’ music? Why isn’t Jay-Z up there? Where are the authentic people who will lead the next generation through the worst economic time since the Great Depression? Where’s the rock ’n’ roll of this generation?
Our generation doesn’t believe anyone has a perfect life. We think inspirational speakers are a joke. We want authenticity. Where are the leaders of our generation with the real stories to inspire us to greatness? I guess motivational speaking will always exist—there will always be a niche market for it—but it needs to evolve, and in the end, whatever is left standing will be authentic and what isn’t will be gone, because our generation recognizes the smell of bullshit like no other. And frankly, most of the personal growth stuff that I read or hear is just that: BS.
On your journey, you’re going to be compelled to invest in your education. You might listen to a motivational speaker, or
buy a book, or listen to some audiobooks. I’m all for that, and I’ll get further into it later in the book. But be wary because there are guys out there who prey on people just like you.
As a speaker myself, I entered the world of motivational speaking with an open mind. I had studied the Bible, eastern religions, and authors like Hill, Carnegie, and Nightingale, whose messages were absolutely pure. I came on the scene thinking that my colleagues were good people who cared only for the impact their messages would have on their audiences. I also assumed that the people doing the teaching were qualified to talk about their topics. Of course I found the opposite. Half the idiots out there pitching their seminars have never done anything but pitch their seminars.
I remember sitting backstage in greenrooms and hearing the most amazing conversations. One time a speaker walked offstage with a smirk and said, “I sucked the money out of the room.”
Another guy asked him, “How much did you get?”
“Oh, two hundred fifty thousand.”
You would think by the way they were speaking that there were twenty thousand people in the audience. Not at all. I’ve witnessed groups of no more than five hundred people part with more than half a million dollars in one sitting.
So what sort of value did these people get, in many cases, for having leveraged their lifetime savings and credit card balances? A recycled message plagiarized from every other hustler. A drug called “effortless prosperity.” Another bit of wisdom I got from the greenroom—most junkies never open the box, one speaker told me.
The charlatans, gypsies, and snake oil salesmen of yesteryear still exist today. Only now they move from town to town under the pretext of “motivational speaker,” “inspirational author,” or simply “coach” or “consultant.”
They claim to have captured prosperity like a genie in a bottle, and they’ll grant you your wildest wishes—for a fee. Buy my book and you’ll be a millionaire in a minute! Buy my audiotapes and you’ll be a billionaire! Enroll in my seminar and I’ll teach you how to be a millionaire in two hours!