Ryan Blair—A True American Hero
If you don’t have intellect or aptitude to become a doctor or a lawyer, what shall you do? The professional career counselor says; go to a trade school, or construction, where you can work with your hands. If you are Ryan Blair, you build a multi-million dollar business and employ doctors and lawyers.
Ryan is a 9th grade dropout of Los Angeles's public school system, and had ADD and dyslexia; in his own words, "Long before I became a millionaire entrepreneur, I was a punk with a juvenile criminal record, street gang experience, and a lot of emotional scarring...My teenage years were hardly the typical starting point for a normal, productive life, let alone a successful business career. Turns out, that didn't matter."
Blair had a tough but relatively stable middle-class childhood until his abusive father gave in to the temptation of drug and deserted the family. His mother moved to a bad neighborhood with him, and not before long Ryan joined a gang and was incarcerated. Then his mother fell in love with a successful entrepreneur who became a mentor to Ryan, and with that his life turned over.
At the age of 21, Blair set up his first company, 24/7 Tech, and since then has started and sold several companies earning himself hundreds of millions of dollars. He has now become an icon who shows other how to start and grow their own businesses successfully, by following his principles which served him well in juvenile detention. Blair says, “If you let someone take your milk the first day, they'll start taking it every day.”
In 2008, Blair sold his company ViSalus Sciences to Blyth in the midst of global recession. The company was on the brink of failure and was on the verge of bankruptcy. As a CEO Ryan bet his last million dollars on its survival and turned the company around from the edge of failure to earn revenue of over $15 million a year to earn the prestigious DSN Global Turn around Award in 2010.
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