Young Entrepreneur Shares Story of His Business Success

Written by JEAN TARBETT HARDIMAN – The Herald-Dispatch.

HUNTINGTON — As a kid growing up in California, Ryan Blair was rewarded through compensation. His father, Huntington native Jerry Blair, would give him $5 to wash the car. One dollar per bag of weeds that he pulled. A new batting glove for a base hit in Little League.

In telling his life story, Blair will tell you that his father had plenty of flaws. But Ryan Blair can also tell you that his dad helped him learn that work pays off, and his father’s mistakes became other valuable life lessons.

Blair, now a 32-year-old entrepreneur who has founded six companies and made millions, brought his story to Huntington Tuesday night, speaking to a group of fellow entrepreneurs. He’s now CEO of ViSalus Sciences, a network marketing business that promotes nutrition products and programs.

Huntington is one of many stops Blair has made throughout the country to share his path to success. But it’s special because of his roots here, he said. Not only was his father from Huntington, but he has family members in the area. His great-grandparents ran a cafeteria at a bus station, he said.

When he first came, “I knew my family by accent,” he said. “I really identify with West Virginia as being half my roots.”

His father, he’s forgiven, Blair said. Now father to a 9-month-old son himself — Ryan Reagan Blair — Blair is in the midst of trying to share his story as a way of helping others.

“By the grace of God, I realize I’ve weathered these storms so I can help other people do the same,” he said.

Blair said the low point of his rags-to-riches story was when his father, addicted to drugs, left him and his mother when Blair was 13. They lost their house in California to foreclosure and cars to repossession. His mom got a job at a deli, they moved into a one-bedroom house in a gang neighborhood, and he dropped out of school and did odd jobs. He’ll tell you about his gang tattoos, and what it sounds like when someone fires a gun at you.

Then, Blair’s mother started dating and eventually married a wealthy real estate investor, and at 18, Blair and his mother moved in with him. It was at that point, Blair said, that he could say he’d known three different “systems” in life: poverty and life on the street; middle class life; and “the most ideal system to run in,” entrepreneurship.

His stepfather, Robert Hunt, had the same work ethic as Blair’s middle-class father and the same hustle as the street kids Blair knew, but Hunt was working in a different system, Blair said he realized.

Blair did odd jobs for minimum wage for his stepfather, everything from manual labor like cleaning his boats to informing tenants of his properties of their eviction. Hunt allowed Blair to shadow his investments to learn about the trade. Blair — who had been held back in second grade and told he suffered from attention deficit disorder as a child — got his GED and eventually made the dean’s list in college.

He got a job at a call center, then went into the company’s IT department and within a couple years had 60 full-time employees under him. At age 21, he founded his own first business, 24/7 Tech, and he’s since owned six.

He started out in fear that people would find out about his background, but since has embraced it and hopes that sharing his story with others encourages them to turn their lives around.

He said he’d always been taught that the more you sow, the more you reap, but there was no way of calculating the magnitude of the rewards, he said.

“The duty of the person who is wealthy is to give back,” he said.

His latest business is ViSalus, which was just bought by Blyth Inc., and has started a 90 Day Challenge weight loss program, along with selling a variety of wellness products.

Originally posted on The Herald-Dispatch

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“Every great entrepreneur understands the value of finding out the reason why a person is in their life,” Ryan Blair said, gearing up to tell another grand story of fateful meetings. “Many people are put into your life for a reason. You never know where a chance encounter will lead you.”

The day Ryan Blair met John Wooden was a perfect example of two destined events. When he arrived at John Wooden’s house in Encino that afternoon, there was a man walking out of the garage. A writer by the name of Don Yaeger.

Don Yaeger was leaving Wooden’s house to pick up some cold medicine. It was spring allergy season. He’d been traveling back and forth from Tallahassee to LA, spending several days at a time with John Wooden in the process of writing a book on the famous coach.

Blair asked if he could borrow the writer’s recording equipment for his meeting. Yaeger agreed, hoping they could use the material for the book, which was centered on Wooden’s lifelong perfection of mentorship. Yaeger got the two men set up to record, and then headed out to the doctor’s office. When he came back, Yaeger said Ryan Blair was getting the most out of his mentorship. He was still there, and they were still talking.

“He was maximizing his time with the coach,” Yaeger said.

After the interview ended, Blair expressed interest in reading the John Wooden biography, which Yaeger said was coming out by fall 2009. The two men parted ways, but destiny was already working to rejoin them in the near future.

Blair realized when he left Wooden’s house he should have brought his own recorder to the meeting; all he had were his notes. He pulled out Don Yaeger’s business card and contacted him. The writer’s assistant sent him the transcribed tapes, and included a press kit on the author.

“I didn’t know anything about Don Yaeger,” Ryan Blair said. “I looked at this press kit, and come to find out he wrote Walter Payton’s book, he’d been on Oprah, Larry King, was a 4 time New York Times best selling author, 11 years at Sports Illustrated as an Associate Editor.”

Ryan laughed. “Here I thought I just met some random guy in Wooden’s garage.”

One day Ryan Blair was talking to mutual friend Coach Dale Brown about his struggles to get his book written; it was difficult to make the time to write a book while actually doing what he wanted to write about. Shortly after, Brown sent him an email reintroducing him to the well-respected author. It simply said, “Don, you met Ryan, you need to write his book.”

So the discussions began. The Wooden book would be soon be finished, and Yaeger set his sights on his next big project, tackling Ryan’s story.

“This was way out of my comfort zone,” Yaeger said. “But then I realized that Ryan’s sport is entrepreneurship. I’m used to talking to competitors, and Ryan is a competitor. As fierce a competitor as Tiger Woods or Jimmy Connors.”

Don Yaeger told Ryan that he had a number of books in him, but he was interested in writing about how to become an entrepreneur. “I own a handful of businesses, from a comedy club to a PR firm,” Yaeger said. “I have a taste of being an entrepreneur, maybe not to the extent Ryan has. But I was taken by the things I was learning in the conversations with him, and before long it made complete sense.”

The author already had an idea for the title of their book: Nothing to Lose. It was a reference to an episode of Donny Deutsche where Blair mentioned leveraging this mindset.

“When he said Nothing to Lose, I thought, you’re right,” Blair said. “That is the mindset that you need to have to start a new business.”

Blair said he wants to make people aware that getting caught up in financial fears, and fear of failure, and their pride, prevents them from taking action. Having nothing to lose is one of the first ingredients to success.

“Now would be a unique time to offer up these ideas to people,” Don Yaeger said. “If a book can be pulled together in time for millions of Americans to use it, it’s the greatest legacy you could leave behind.”

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