Building Your Brand through a Pandemic with Ryan Staley

[00:00:00] Brad Seaman: So I’d love to know. You just, just tell me the, tell me the story. How’d you get to the whale boss,

[00:00:05] Ryan Staley: man. I’ll get into the the superhero origin story. Cause that’s what I always like to, to call it. Like I’m on my podcast is that everybody has one and it’s, it’s totally different. So in terms of going back, I guess something that’s relative for folks that are in your audience is like my first real sales job was an inside sales rep.

Right. So I had a make 250 dials a day just smashed the phone button. Really didn’t use email much. They just smile and dial up and basically was selling high-level training to CEOs and CTOs of investment banks and brokerages. So like Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, and companies like that, where I had to get through.

B admins. I had to find a way to get to the global CTO and then basically close them. Like it was boiler room, you know, close them within a couple of minutes or 24 hours or less. So that was a character building job, but a lot of great things came from it. Now,

[00:01:05] Brad Seaman: did you have, just out of curiosity, was that the Marcus Evans position?

So what were you guys? So what was the, it was a training.

[00:01:12] Ryan Staley: Oh dude, that, that company was really interesting. Cause like, it was one of the, it was the first job out of college. So my, my job, like, you know, you know how you don’t know what you don’t know, like to an utmost extreme. So I was like 21, 22 at the time.

And it was a job where I got paid $1,500 a month and plus commission, but that was a draw. Right. So but I’m just like, oh, this is the way the world is. Right. But yeah, it was basically like, Selling round table discussions on cutting edge technology on like XML for straight through processing was one of the big, the big things that they focused on.

There that I was involved with online banking and brokerage. So just stuff like that, man.

[00:01:54] Brad Seaman: Now, did they, did they recruit you at a school? Did you get a recruiter on campus? Is that how you ended up?

[00:02:00] Ryan Staley: No, I just started looking at and applied to jobs. I wanted to get in a marketing or sales and I love the concept of sales being.

You know, really, really performance based. Cause I, I had a sales job in college where I sold yellow page advertising door to door, which was another character building job. Right. And did really well with that. And so my eyes were opened to marketing and sales found this job. And then from there I went into an outside sales position then later in a leadership position.

So like half my career was, was basically sales, mostly complex. And then I moved into a leadership position for about nine and a half years. Grew an enterprise sales team from zero to 30 billion in annual reoccurring revenue with only four sales reps and no marketing department or SDR department. And then once from there basically you’re talking about, you know, I know you talked a lot about the mental game.

I was just kind of tired working for someone else, my entire career. And it got to the point where, you know, probably. Couple of years of my job. I just, I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. Right. We were closing massive deals and super exciting. But eventually got to the point where I wanted something more.

And, you know, I started working on my brand, started working on other things team was still doing well. And then, you know, the, the CEO told me he wasn’t too happy about me working on my brand and other stuff. In the middle of COVID and then they told me you know, at the peak of COVID that I, I didn’t need to work there anymore.

So that was, yeah, so right. This was like March 31st, 2020. So from there I started my own company. So

[00:03:43] Brad Seaman: that’s like weeks before. Is that right before the sh so what day was that?

[00:03:48] Ryan Staley: March 31st. So

[00:03:49] Brad Seaman: this would have been a couple of weeks, the week of the ninth or the 10th was like the shutdown,

[00:03:53] Ryan Staley: right? Yeah, man. It was a yeah, shut down two weeks before.

And you know, it was one of those situations, a CEO took zero pay. They basically furloughed 75% of the company. And, you know, first he’s like, well, you’re going to have to basically commit to not doing anything, you know, with your, your own side business or whatever. Even though I communicated in advance, that was, that was my plan.

Right. They, they were fine with it cause I was still fully dedicated. But then the next day they came back and like, Hey, we had an investor meeting and you can’t work here anymore. And so so that was like, that was a moment that really accelerated. But it was really hard at the time because of all the uncertainty involved.

However, it was one of the. Possible things in my life that could have happened to me. Cause it got me started on this path

[00:04:45] Brad Seaman: now what’s so so we got a friend of the podcast who’s been on Rob bell. He says, you know, you can’t connect the dots in the he says you can only connect the dots to the rear view mirror.

So are you far enough out of that, that you can tell. Okay. That was that was good. That was a good thing that happened to you because it accelerated you.

[00:05:02] Ryan Staley: Yeah, well I, so Brad, I always knew it was a good thing. Like when it happened, You know, that was the peak where like, you look at your investments, for example, on your investments.

Like the stock market dropped like 40% and like a couple of weeks. Right? So that’s a bit of an ocean moment where you’re like, okay, what’s going on here? However I can tell myself, I’m like, Hey, this is going to be a hell of a redemption story. You know, where I started a business and, you know, grew from scratch during this period.

So it was something that kept me motivated and kind of. Looking forward with what’s possible. Like, I don’t know if you’ve read the book man’s search for meaning. I haven’t actually, I have

[00:05:42] Brad Seaman: not, but I’ve not read it. I’m familiar with it. It’s the second time in probably four episodes it’s been brought up.

S what is her? Kendra Warlow brought it up four weeks ago. So she, I know it was important in her job.

[00:05:57] Ryan Staley: Yeah. And so, I mean, I’ve, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about it. I haven’t read it, but like the core concept of that book, from what I understand is it’s based on my everything’s based on the meaning you give it like facts don’t really matter.

And so that’s, that’s kind of like how I look at it. And I’m finally kind of out of the muck, I would say, you know, cause the first four or five, six months I was figuring out exactly what I wanted to do. And then I started talking with CEO. Just through my network and they’re like, dude, you grew a business from zero to 30 million in annual reoccurring revenue and like five years, five and a half years with four salespeople.

Like I want to know how to do that. Yeah.

[00:06:39] Brad Seaman: So T so T so tell me about that. Cause that’s, cause that is interesting. What were you guys selling it flex?

[00:06:45] Ryan Staley: It was a managed services for companies print environments. So it was literally one of the least sexiest things you could possibly say. It was, yeah. So basically we would, we would sell large outsourcing agreements and compete with like HP or Lexmark.

[00:07:03] Brad Seaman: So on the, on the print side. Yeah. Okay. So like what would a contract? So what would when you, when you, I always think print, I always think like sales material, but it’s not necessarily that it could be bank. I mean, it could be like bank printouts and not guns. Like what would be a client example? So,

[00:07:19] Ryan Staley: yeah, like for example, one of the best clients we got.

That I’m most proud of is, is we got cold an agreement with Amazon whole foods. Right. And so you know, we’re talking over a half million plus a month in annual recurring revenue and it’s the ma it was to manage the entire fleet of, of all their stores of all the devices in their store. They printed out like signs and tags and stuff like

[00:07:47] Brad Seaman: that.

Gotcha. So if I go, so if I, so whole foods, so if I go in anything I see in print potentially was coming out of your facility.

[00:07:57] Ryan Staley: Most of it. Yeah. Well, no, it wasn’t coming out. It was just managing. And I mean, I can’t speak for that now. Right. Cause that’s, I’m not, I haven’t been there for over a year, you know?

But, but that, that’s like an example of how. Of support people. So, so yeah, man, so basically what we did that, the way you asked the question, like, how do we do that? Which is always like the number one question is like, oh yeah, how do you do this? Right. And what I would tell you is like the number one thing we did, and this is what I help companies with is kind of what I call whale scaling.

Right. So inadvertently, like I designed a whole go to market strategy. And one of the things that I did intuitively, just because I was getting pushed to like constantly perform at a higher level with my team, which we had no team when we started, there was no reps, they were inexperienced, no B2B sales experience.

And so that journey, how that happened was like, you know, for example, we might start off with, with deal sizes that were $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month. Right. Well, what we would constantly do is keep refining and optimizing. And so those $20,000 deals would then, you know, we’d start getting deals that are $40,000 a month and they were a hundred thousand dollars a month.

Then they were $300,000 a month. Then there were $600,000 a month. So essentially what happened with that is, you know, through, through looking at that. And I don’t know if you know this, but that’s kind of one of the key strategies that snowflake uses, which has had the largest IPO. SaaS history is they have like a 50 and 50 model where they look at their 50 biggest deals and their 50 fastest deals continuously, and then responding to that.

So that, that’s how we did that. And then at the same time, like I’m not, I mean, like medic for example, or MedPAC is one of the most like dominant frameworks that people use for larger deal sizes. And that was created in 1996. So like, imagine how much the world has changed many, seven. Yeah. And so intuitively I just kept refining what worked and what didn’t, and then created my own selling methodology all the way from the strategy, the process and the execution, which is what yielded those results.

And I kept looking at what we were doing, right. What we were doing wrong. And, you know, my team did an awesome job. They worked their butts off.

[00:10:18] Brad Seaman: Now is in a, in manage print or the Mar is it the margins tight. And is it highly competitive?

[00:10:25] Ryan Staley: Oh yeah, it’s, it’s used as a commodity, but we sold it as a solution.

So, I mean, you could go and buy pretty much. You could, self-assemble a solution and a commodity manner, but because we, we sold it with a lot of value and package it the right way. We were able to sell it as a manager.

[00:10:46] Brad Seaman: Gotcha. And then did you have, and it looked like you had some you know, big company experience.

What did you like better working kind of small business, like small to mid-sized business or fortune, you know, kind of fortune 1000?

[00:11:00] Ryan Staley: Well, I started off grad working, you know, as a rep and smaller mid-market and then moved up market. And then I, I did the same thing with my team. You know, we had to stabilize the office.

Nothing was happening even on the mid-market side. So started there and then jumped over. I went full time on the enterprise team.

[00:11:21] Brad Seaman: So, so did you have so you’re saying, Hey, you’ve always kind of worked up from, from the ground

[00:11:27] Ryan Staley: kind of ground up. Yeah. I mean, like that’s the thing I never worked for like an Oracle or an SAP or a company with massive infrastructure.

It was always. Companies that were newer to the market where comp was highly leveraged and it was a performance based service. Oh,

[00:11:42] Brad Seaman: okay. Cause I, so like when I think about Pitney Bowes, cause you were at Pitney Bowes for a while, I always think about them as being a really large company. Do you think about, is that because they were in the managed services piece that you sort of have that kind of a subset?

[00:11:54] Ryan Staley: Yep. So Pitney Bowes acquired the company that oh,

[00:11:57] Brad Seaman: okay. No, that makes

[00:11:59] Ryan Staley: sense. Okay.

[00:12:01] Brad Seaman: Well that makes, makes sense. So Pitney Bowes bond. Okay. So yeah, so you’d always been at the, well, that makes sense. Okay. Interest. Super fascinating. So then you’re, you weren’t even there, they changed the logos on it,

[00:12:15] Ryan Staley: basically.

Yeah. I mean, I was at Lowe’s at Pitney Bowes for maybe like a year and a half, but I was at the prior company for maybe like four years. Okay.

[00:12:23] Brad Seaman: Well that makes sense. I guess I totally forgot about that. That like you could have acquisitions and then LinkedIn changes the.

That’s super. That’s super funny. Well, one of the things I want you highlighted, but I want to talk about is you know, I do think sales. So you mentioned brand, I think sales is changing. We’re starting to just kind of see this emergence of the I’m going to call it the, the marketing sales rep. So the sales rep that’s on LinkedIn.

They’re using content they’re maybe using some of their early, some of their more millennial skills to, to drive, drive demand. You had picked up kind of what you’ve mentioned that you were working on your brand, what made you decide like, Hey, I should be like, tell me that process. Like you’re working somewhere, you’re creating a brand at some point there’s kind of, it sounded like there’s some conflict between your brand and the company’s brand.

Walk me through that process. Like, I guess the first question would be what made you feel like starting to build your brand was important? Like what was going through your mind?

[00:13:22] Ryan Staley: Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s a great question, Brad, and it, you know, one of the things was like, I ran into the situation where I was like, okay, like, I know I don’t want to do this forever.

Like, I don’t want my boss’s job and I don’t want the CEO’s job. Right. And I try to innovate and be like an intrepreneur first. And there was different things that I tried to do to, to, to roll out or accomplish. And I kept getting stonewalled half the time, you know, and a big reason why. You know, and, and there’s, there’s good investors in his bad investors, man.

And the investor guys were great, but I went through multiple PE cycles as you know, throughout my career. And at the end of the day, you know, they both kind of sucked halfway through, because what would happen is a lot of times the senior management team would get eliminated, right. Or they would swap people out.

They would bring in people that had great resumes that often didn’t have experience working at a company that size. And then they would shave down margins as much as possible in, in ways of comp or ways of other areas. So it made it harder and harder to hit your number. So this was a trend that happened multiple times and I’m like, all right.

To, to work on my brand. I’m like, I don’t know. I know I don’t want to stay here forever. I want to do something else. And most of my time in my career was dedicated to networking and acquiring customers versus networking with my peers or other opportunities. So it was one of those things where I’m like, I kind of woke up and I’m like, I’m not going to be here forever.

You know, my numbers are going up in terms of performance expectations. But the amount of getting paid is going down. This isn’t a great story. I’ve been through it before and started paving the way for the future, man.

[00:15:07] Brad Seaman: I that’s that’s. That’s awesome. So how long, what I find fascinating is that, you know, you th I mean, you sort of nailed it.

So I don’t find this as you know, I think I heard Jeff Bezos say one time when the, when the CFO becomes the CEO you’re in trouble. And that happens in a lot of PE situations, right. Is that you get. Heavily financed minded in in

[00:15:28] Ryan Staley: yeah. Yeah. The way I look at it is, and this is a key criteria for anyone listening is if you’re going to take a position and you’re not the founder, you’re not the CEO, you’re a revenue leader, or you are a rep always understand.

Is your CEO and operations based CEO, or are they a sales minded CEO? They usually fit in one of those two buckets. And, or like when I say operations, that’s like product. You know, a tactical CTO or CEO, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just usually they have different views on sales and outlooks on that.

So,

[00:16:02] Brad Seaman: yeah. No, that’s super fascinating. So what do you, what are some of the things that, you know, if you have an operational CEO or, you know, a product minded CEO, you’re a sales guy you’re working for one, what, what would you say some of the downs? What are the advantages and disadvantages to both of those?

[00:16:17] Ryan Staley: Yeah. I mean, well, You probably your processes are going to be tighter or your processes are going to be aligned better than this. This is based on my experience, right? If, if a sales minded CEO gets a great who, then, then that’s not going to be the situation. However, what typically happens is if people start performing at a really high level and they’re working for an operation CEO or product based CEO, a lot of times we’ll say, okay, well, Like there’s some people making a lot of money here and that’s, that’s like too much money they’re making.

So, you know, we need to adjust the comp plan and you know, and so I’ve seen situations like that happen so many times, Brad. So I would say that’s, that’s kind of one of the big ones,

[00:16:58] Brad Seaman: which I think is hilarious, which I think is really funny. Cause you don’t have that revenue if you don’t have it.

[00:17:04] Ryan Staley: What the products will get.

It sells itself bread. Like tell me how many times you don’t hear that. Right. And I’m not bagging on it. I’m like, I know great, you know, operations, minded CEOs, but like the other thing that I’ve seen is like, there’s a lot more barriers to getting big deals done, where you have to be incredibly nimble and flexible.

And a lot of times, if it doesn’t fit the box, They don’t want to do it. So so this is word of caution. It’s not like that in every situation, it’s just something to, to keep your your radar upon

[00:17:36] Brad Seaman: yeah. That’s I think that’s, I think it’s interesting. Just the, you know, how now you run. So, so talk to me about, you know, a large day.

So you mentioned you know, how you gotta get creative, so, you know, have you ever seen a large deal kind of go awry? Cause you got two kids.

[00:17:54] Ryan Staley: That’s that’s a great question. I mean, if you go too far outside of your core competency yeah. It’s going to crash and burn because you can’t execute and you’ll see people that you’ll, you’ll try and do stuff that competitors are doing right.

In terms of to creative. I wouldn’t say that we’re only at only a phase, it brushes with the areas of like, you, you can’t execute like it’s so far outside of what you do and you’re promising air which we never really did that. I think one time I saw the big deal. We were working with a fortune 10 company and you know, this is one of the things that I’ve learned too, is that sometimes customers are too big where you don’t want.

Right. Okay. They could have $2 million in monthly reoccurring revenue and, you know, the margins suck. Right. And they, they, they, they want to blow through all your resources. So like there’s a situation where we’re working a deal like that. And there’s a big part of what they wanted us to do in the RFP.

And we tried to align with that instead of backing out of the RFP, which I tried to do. But Executive team didn’t want to, because I’m like, this is outside of our core competency and like, we’re not built to win in this situation. So we had to leverage an outsourcer to do it, which if you’re dealing with a deal size of that magnitude, there’s no way you’re going to be competitively

[00:19:15] Brad Seaman: priced.

Yeah. Well, I think sales in business, I mean, you really have, it’s kind of a dichotomy. It’s almost like it’s always good to diversify, except for when it’s not like you don’t know when the, you don’t know when those situations are. Right. And You know, if you diversify too much and it doesn’t work out, then all of a sudden there was a bad idea.

Right. But you don’t know when though, you don’t like take Amazon. For example, Amazon is super diversified, right? They’ve got multiple lines of business, you know, if, if, if they had just stuck to their core competency, they’d be selling books. And so it’s always, so I always say it’s always good to diversify except for when it’s not.

And unfortunately you don’t know when that is. And you gotta make, you gotta make good decisions you know, and look at what you’re good at and your resources. But I think that’s business and that’s sales, right? Like you just have to know, you gotta be able to draw the line. Well,

[00:20:06] Ryan Staley: a lot of what I hear is like, I mean, you could people try and when people try and diversify too early, I think is when they crash, right?

Like you should be able to get over a million in revenue. Couple of million plus without having, you know, four or five product lines like apple, I think during when Steve jobs was there, you know, the first thing he did when, when apple was in their death spiral is I think they have 300 products and you reduced it down at 10 all the way down to 10 products.

And that started the recovery. Eventually they were the first. 30 billion with a B $30 billion company. And I think they had 30 products total. That’s it? Maybe it was even 10. It might’ve been 10 on that too. I just read the, the innovation secrets of Steve jobs is an amazing book, highly recommend it, but I’m really, really insightful about some things like that in terms of focus.

Cause he’s like you could have your team on your top products. Like he did kind of a. For product matrix, right? He did, you know, business and then, you know, personal and he did, he did like a desktop and then he did like a portable. That was all I focused on is like, Hey, if we cut down the number of products massively, we can have our 18 on the best products.

We come out with a new version every nine months versus every 18 months and just yielded awesome results.

[00:21:36] Brad Seaman: Yeah. It’s like, you know, that’s, it’s, it’s interesting. So where do you feel like? Yeah, I think the difference in diversification really comes around is like, are you diversifying? Because you’re trying to be everything to everybody or are you diversifying?

Cause it’s part of a, you know, a progression it’s naturally progressive.

[00:21:55] Ryan Staley: Yeah. I mean, eventually if you’d take really good care of your customers, you’re going to want to have

[00:22:00] Brad Seaman: different prices. You don’t want to have your brothers. Yup.

[00:22:03] Ryan Staley: Yep. I mean Palentier, which is like, you’ve got a $40 billion valuation.

They have, I think they’re doing, I don’t remember how much revenue they’re doing, but they have, you know, basically 66% of the revenue from their time. 10 customers top 20. I think pet

[00:22:19] Brad Seaman: Palantir’s would really enjoy it. That’s super interesting. It’s like, cause it’s still, it’s like big and stealthy and nobody really knows anything about it.

[00:22:27] Ryan Staley: Yeah, exactly.

[00:22:31] Brad Seaman: It’s so, well, awesome. What, you know, what’s the one thing that you’re kind of the most passionate about, right.

[00:22:39] Ryan Staley: Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of things, man. Like in business, I think the market is, it is completely misguided founders, especially that they think VC money is the only way that they could survive and grow.

And I think it’s a massive service. Cause I mean, I’ve heard so many horror stories. Like I said, that all ambassadors are bad. But I’m really passionate that like, if you can’t turn $1 and a $10, how are you gonna. A million and a 10 million. Right. And, and so like, everybody’s like, you got to get funny, you got to get funny.

And, and so these four founders are brainwashed and thinking that’s the only solution to getting them to scale their company. Whereas if they invested that time and energy into growing, as opposed to just chasing ambassadors, because the average cycle is like 18 months to get investment, then they could grow because Brad 97% of companies that have seed money, don’t make it to the next round.

[00:23:34] Brad Seaman: So what happens to them? If they don’t raise the money, do they go out of business or they just, they get stuck at the, they get stuck in the down, like a down round

[00:23:40] Ryan Staley: scenario that time they don’t, they go out of business. Man, we go out of business because they just run out. It’s staggering. Like how, how bad it is, like in terms of just the conversion rates of investments.

And I know there’s investors are risking their money, so I get that however, Like, you know, basically what happens is like people create their own company and you found it, three companies, you, you know what it’s like, are you, you are free companies. Right? Right. Like you create a company because you want to be the king or you want to be the queen.

And so what happens is like you have that mindset, you want to work for someone else, and then you get investors and you go from being a kin or a queen to a pawn. And a lot of times those CEOs get fed fire, you know, after years after a couple years, Like I there’s one CA I know that he went through a better cycle and he got he’s.

He got, they celebrated him after three years because he was the longest CEO that ever made it for that fund three

[00:24:40] Brad Seaman: w well, I think a big mistake people make is, you know, they they’re look, there are a winner take all markets for sure. But I, I think a lot of times people, most markets. Yeah, those markets aren’t aren’t winner-take-all markets.

Now sometimes it’s hard to tell which ones are going to be, you know, winner-take-all but you know, I think that Most markets are not winner-take-all markets. And if you takes something to, if you do something excellent over a long period of time, then you look like Chick-fil-A and you know, they’re, they’re, they’ve, they’ve got their own little moat around their, around their business.

And they sell chicken sandwich for goodness sakes. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s frigging jig is

[00:25:20] Ryan Staley: up, so that’s, I love that analogy. That’s great. The chicken sandwich vote will.

[00:25:25] Brad Seaman: Have a chicken savers, why wife’s convinced that they have something in the food, but but yeah, it’s definitely, you know, the three lines wrapped around the building.

I read everywhere you go. I mean, I’ve never seen, I’ve never seen a Chick-fil-A that isn’t CA you know, isn’t chaos. And I think part, I mean, I, this is my personal belief on chicken flight. Cause I, I do like what they’ve built you know, the big difference between Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s is that.

Chick-fil-A is a, like a springboard for all their employees. Most of the guys were going to chick filet or not trying to work there for their whole life. Right, right. That makes a big

[00:25:59] Ryan Staley: difference. Yeah. I could totally see that. That makes sense. Great advancement opportunities. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:04] Brad Seaman: That’s a concern.

And obviously they got full-time employees, but I think a lot of it is about advancement. So what about personal? So you said, so you’re, you’re as passionate, which by the way, I think is a great thing. I think it’s there is a lot of, a lot of these CEOs think you have to raise money. I think you bring up a really good point that just growing, you know, growing your business, I think a lot of that’s driven out of fear.

Right. Some of it also too, you know, software’s expensive, so that makes it, you know, I think that can make it challenging. And so you’re competing with you’re competing with trying to pay salaries. Which can be hard, but in most cases I think, you know, most problems are people problems not money problems.

Not all of them. Sometimes you have money problems, but a lot of times you throw money at people problems. And instead of people. So I think that’s, I think that’s awesome. And then what about personally? What’s, what’s the one thing personal you sounded like you maybe had multi you’re, multiple, multi passionate.

[00:27:00] Ryan Staley: Yeah, man. Well, I mean, I love family and I love growth. Like those are, you know, growth experiences. So you know, and what I mean by that are adventures, you know, like I went surfing with my family and Maui three years ago and my kids, you know, tried it when they were. Really little, you know, they’re eight and five and stuff that I think is cool.

Like we were talking a little bit before the show, but like I made the, the the world finals for fantasy football one year. That was, that was cool. Cause I got to catch passes from like Joe Montana and Dan Marino there and met them. You know, so like I like adventures like that and then personal growth.

I really like holistically. I don’t know if it was a midlife crisis or why, but that’s what edged me to get out of the corporate. It does try and serve and help people that are struggling. And that’s why it crosses over into like some of the other stuff we talked about with like founders wanting to grow their business and that’s their dream.

Like, I think that’s so cool to help someone be able to realize that and just be a part of that, you know? So. I would say that, man, I know I hit on a lot of different areas and

[00:28:10] Brad Seaman: this is great. This is what we covered. We covered a lot of stuff. I

[00:28:13] Ryan Staley: love it. Yeah, man. So that’s that, that’s what I would say.

That’s, that’s what I enjoy the most. And you know, life is my life totally changed about six years ago when I kind of rebuilt myself from the inside out. And I think it’s never too late to do that. No matter how old you are or what you do. So that you could try and look at and enjoy life at completely different level.

Now, is

[00:28:35] Brad Seaman: that, was that, did you have an experience or you just got to, it was that kind of age. Was that like experienced, driven or age driven? Like, did you get to a certain age where you’re like, Hey, you reevaluate it or did you have like a life situation?

[00:28:49] Ryan Staley: Yeah, man. It was, it was both, you know, I mean, you started getting older and you’re like, this is like, if you do really well, you’re making good money.

You have the things you’re like, is this all there is. Right. And then, you know, at one point I was working so hard and working so much and investing all my time, all my energy into business, that my personal relationships started a meltdown. You know, I wasn’t around my family much was around my kids. And I, to be perfectly Frank, like I wasn’t enjoying life that much, it kind of sucked, you know, it was just like a grind, rose, grinding myself into nothing, you know, while, while I was working for someone else as hard as I can and didn’t even have loyalty from them.

So I’m like, what the hell am I doing? You know what I mean? And so that’s, that’s a big part of where it kind of comes from. I think that, and you know, sometimes you just want more out of life and you want to start looking at your legacy. What you contribute to the world. And I decided the path I was born down, wasn’t going to allow me to fulfill that.

[00:29:53] Brad Seaman: Awesome. Well, awesome. I know that the going out and making a leap you know, it can be a lot, cause I’ve been, I’ve been there where you just sort of like, Hey, we’re doing this and I’ll just take the car. I’ll take all the cards as they fall. And you just kinda jump, jump off the back of the plane and say, let’s get it.

[00:30:10] Ryan Staley: Yeah. It’s I mean it, dude, it’s, it’s really. I’ve had to like break the old version of myself to become the new version of myself with some of this. And if there’s time, there’s days where it’s really hard, I’m really hard. And then there’s days where it’s amazing. So it’s just like keep building and building and stacking.

And then the amazing days outweigh that the tough days. Yeah. I

[00:30:31] Brad Seaman: think the hardest thing. And so I’d read a I’m not really a video gamer, but I listened. I was reading this book by Sid Meyer. Who’s the founder of civilization. And in the book he talks about pretty much all the significant events that happened in his life.

He didn’t really realize any of the significance is why they were, when they were occurring. And I also heard what he was trying to say is like, you know, the problem with thinking about like really monumental events in your life. Like we’re pre fascinated with manual events is that they create like a, I think he called it a letdown situation is where you.

It’s hard to understand the significance of events as they’re occurring. Like you just, if you’re in the middle of it. And so what he was trying to say was like, Hey, you just got to live the day for what it is. And you got to let those things happen and occur. And I think another quote that I heard is by Leo Burnett, and I’ve read this in one of his books and I can’t ever seem to find the quote.

But he gave a speech and the speech basically said that everything significant in my life was full of yelling and stuff. At the time it was awful, right? Like everything you ever accomplished that was of any significance, a word for was full of anguish and yelling and screaming. So Ryan. This was awesome, man.

How to how to do

[00:31:48] Ryan Staley: you take great Matt? It was a lot of fun. I appreciate having me on the show and yeah, man.

[00:31:53] Brad Seaman: So hope you guys enjoyed that as always. If you want more information on the podcast, go to monster connect.com forward slash podcast. You can get last seasons last year’s episode. You can get all the new episodes for this year.

And as always remember, don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can until next time.