Ryan Stewman: Yes, sir, fully prepared.

John Lee Dumas: Ryan is a two time bestselling author, master salesman, a blogger, and founder of Clyxo.com, that’s C-L-Y-X-O.com. His story is a true hood to good tale of struggle and triumph. And Fire Nation, I just saw this dude rock the stage in front of 1,100 people live at Funnel Hacking Live. He is a master storyteller. He is a master entrepreneur and I’m bringing you here today. So Ryan, take a minute, fill in any gaps from that intro and give us just a little glimpse of your personal life.

Ryan Stewman: First of all, I’m excited to be here, super excited. And what makes it even cooler is that you got to see me just a few days ago and I didn’t even know you were there until Russel called you out. I was like, “Oh wait, I’m about to be on his show.” So this is ultimately exciting for me.

John Lee Dumas: Called me out in a good way, Fire Nation, in a good way.

Ryan Stewman: Yeah, yeah. It could have gone either way, right? He could have been like, “Hey, you got to cancel that guy’s appointment.” Yeah, [inaudible] [00:00:57]. So I’m just glad it went well for me, right?

So the quick story on me is I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve never had a salary job. I’ve never taken a paid time off day in my life. I’ve been a salesman my entire life. And I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. I’ve been to prison a few times. I’ve been divorced three times. I have a history of failing and learning from mistakes, right? That’s what we hard headed people have to do and that’s really what this show is going to be about, too.

But fill in the blanks for me is I really, like you said, went from hood to good. I went from the penitentiary to where I live right now, which is the penthouse in the nicest building in Dallas. And I’ve done that selling my way from the bottom to the top. So me in a glimpse, a hard knocks life that’s now living the high life I guess.

John Lee Dumas: Well, I do love that in your presentation you showed a nice picture from your penthouse with your sons. And you said, “Hey, it’s no San Diego view, but for Texas it’s as good as it gets.”

And I’m like, “You know what? I respect that and it really is.”

So Ryan, what I want to do is shift a little bit because we have listeners here today, Fire Nation, my audience, who are entrepreneurs, small business owners, looking to take their business to the next level or just looking to create a viable business potentially for the first time. Now, as you know, as I know, viable businesses generate revenue. So how do you, Ryan, generate revenue today in 2016?

Ryan Stewman: Most of my revenue – and we do multiple six figures a month in gross sales at Hardcore Closer, the company that I’m the CEO of and own. And most of our revenue comes from selling digital products. That’s why I was at Funnel Hacking Live is I’m a big proponent and affiliate for Click Funnels and in Russel’s private inner circle, whatever you want to call it. And we generate sales and generate revenue from sales of membership sites.

So we have products ranging from $27.00 all the way up to $25,000.00 and I have a sales team that works for me and I generate the leads. They get the leads, they follow my sales process, and most of it is digital products. I do some consulting and things like that, but we have 13 different digital products that we sell. And so pretty much on every phone call that my sales team makes they can make some money on it because we have everything that’s affordably priced. We have a really good pricing strategy. Plus we have a bunch of raving fans. I get little speaking gigs and stuff like that, but most of my revenue is coming from digital product sales, which is really easy to deliver, right? You make a sale and then it’s done.

And that’s the beauty about what we do especially since we sell sales training, ironically, right? But that’s the beauty of it is we make a sale and then the deliverable is adding someone’s email to Click Funnels. It’s that simple. Instead of having to turn around and coach people like some people they can make a sale, but then they got to turn around and go coach somebody or spend actual time with them or whatever the case. I’ve made it to where really the salespeople that work for me, that’s all they have to do is sell, add people to digital program, move forward, and sell again. And they love that because they get to do what salespeople do best, sell and not have to worry about delivering a bunch of stuff or coaching people or anything like that on the backend.

John Lee Dumas: For three years now I’ve been publishing monthly income reports, like really detailed, down to the penny of revenue coming in, expenses going out, and everything in between. We bring our CPA on to talk about numbers and taxes, etc. and to just make sure everything’s valid so he can kind of just have that crystal clear idea of exactly what we’re trying to share with Fire Nation, which is this is how you run a business the right way.

And what I loved during your talk, Ryan, is that you had this whiteboard where every month you’re actually writing down these numbers on this big sheet of paper, whatever revenue you might have generated and the ways that it’s come in. What are you thoughts on transparency? You were very transparent on stage. Do you bring that through to every part of your business or is that just kind of a special thing for the presentation you were giving?

Ryan Stewman: No, dude, I’m that way in every part of my life. I mean, shoot, 30 seconds into the show I’m like, “Prison, divorced.” Who does that, right? That’s just how I am, right? I don’t like holding things in. And there’s a lot of people out there and you know this. I’m not knocking anybody in particular, but people throw big numbers around and this, that, and the other. And I don’t want to be one of those guys that just throws big numbers around and then people wonder, “Well, I wonder if he’s right or not?”

So in the presentation you’re talking about I showed people all these different PayPal receipts and all these different basically monthly reports for the last three or four months. And I’m like, “Hey, this is what I pay taxes on and everything else” just because I want people to know that I’m not kidding around when I say this thing. When I put these numbers out there for everybody, I don’t want them to – how many wondered? Just like you said it instantly validates me because 99 percent of the people out there throwing big numbers around would freak out if the IRS taxed them according to what their mouth says, right?

John Lee Dumas: And I love when you said that on stage. You got a big chuckle from the audience. And it’s so true. And that’s actually why I use Kickstarter for my resent Freedom Journal campaign. A lot of people said, “Why are you using Kickstarter, John?”

I’m like, “Well, listen. It’s an independent third party and I want these numbers that” – I knew they were going to be big numbers, a lot of backers, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. I wanted it to be this independent third party so it wasn’t just me taking out numbers and just saying, “Oh yeah, we did X numbers.”

No, you go to Kickstarter. You see this independent third party that’s just displaying the revenue and the backers. That’s the kind of transparency and authenticity that I’m looking to bring to the game. And Ryan, it’s great that you are as well.

Now, I do want to shift because you have so many stories, so many stories and we could go on about them. You did a great job on stage with being concise. And I know you will again today because the one story that I’m really looking for you to do a deep dive into is what you consider your worst entrepreneurial moment to date. And we’ve all had bad ones and you’ve had a lot of tough ones and a lot of great ones, but what’s the worst, Ryan? Take us to that moment and tell us that story.

Ryan Stewman: Well, it’s kind of an ego thing that happened to me. Everybody wants to tell the story about how everything was perfect: church on Sunday, rainbows, unicorns, here I am a millionaire, right? That’s what everybody wants you to believe. And what happened to me was extremely embarrassing, but it was no fault to my own. It just kind of fell into place.

So I had started building up this online business and I was making decent money like $10,000.00 or $15,000.00 a month, even to pay the bills or whatever, right? And I was renting out my house to a friend of mine that I own. And I was renting out another home in a different city, right? It was a little bit bigger house, renting out the one that I own, and then I was going to lease the other one not buy it.

Anyway, long story short. The people backed out of the lease of the one that I was going to buy and I couldn’t back out. This was my friend and his family. They got kids and they had already made arrangements that were moving into the house that I own. So here I am telling people how life’s great and you can make money online and I had to go move in with my in-laws, right? But I owned it and I didn’t feel like I needed to justify anything.

But then it was like that moment where it was like, “I’m one of these dudes that has to live at his in-laws and tell people now that their life is all great.”

Now, lucky for me my in-laws are extremely wealthy, so it was like living in the east wing of the bat mansion, right? So it was no big deal. But it’s not like I lived in a trailer or anything like that. But on the flipside, at that same time my wife at the time got pregnant as well and I didn’t have insurance as an entrepreneur and that was a huge thing for me, right? Like, “Oh no, man. What if something’s wrong with my child when it’s born? I got to go do something.”

And I had to get a corporate job. And so I went and sold cars because I knew that was fast money and something that I wouldn’t get too attached to that I could leave when the time was right. But literally I looked up and here I was trying to become an entrepreneur and then I was stuck living at my in-laws and working a day job as a car salesman. I’m like, “I’m pretty sure this is the definition of an entrepreneur. This is the kind of stuff that we go through and the things that nobody talks about.”

But it was a very humbling time, you know what I mean? It was like dude, I never want to be in this position again. Not that I didn’t like selling cars. It was fun. But I didn’t like the money. I was used to – for those of you that may have understood my story in the past or heard it in the past is I used to do mortgages and I lost my license there due to being a felon in 2010. So it was just this whole fiasco, man. It was like an all-time low.

But I remember using that point and I still think about it a lot when I’m feeling down I’m like, “Well, look, dude. It’s better to feel down in a penthouse and crying in infinity than it is at your in-law’s house, right?”

So it just reminds me that where I’ve come from and I guess we’re all going to go through some stuff, man, but that was the really low point. So every time I’m down now I think back, “Oh, man, it could be worse. At least we’re where we are now.”

John Lee Dumas: One thing that I don’t think is just specific to entrepreneurs, I think it’s really humans in general for some reason; we seem to have this malady where we continue to upgrade our lifestyle to match our income. So if we’re making $50,000.00 a year, we’re living a lifestyle of $50,000.00 a year. And then we up that income to $100,000.00 a year and now our lifestyle’s a $100,000.00 a year and we look at our bank accounts at the end and the money actually leftover, the money in our bank account, is the same as when we were making 50 K because we keep upping that lifestyle.

So Fire Nation, you really need to step back and say, “Hey, where am I actually going with this business? What am I putting first? What are my priorities?”

And I love that you brought up the word multiple times, Ryan, humble. And for me growing up there were many times when my uncle took me aside and I’ll never forget it. He would look me in the eye and say, “John, be humble, be happy.”

So then I always equated happiness with being humble. And that’s helped me many times. Of course, I’ve slipped off the wagon plenty of times myself, but I’ve always gone back to that quote and said hey, this is to me what happiness is, is being humble. So Fire Nation, as your business is growing, as you’re doing the things, just realize okay, your lifestyle doesn’t have to quite keep pace with that. You can still put a couple bucks in the bank and save it for that rainy day that is coming for all of us.

Now, for you Ryan, shifting to another story, you’ve had some great aha moments in your life. And, again, you told a couple killer ones on stage. But for Fire Nation go to one of your greatest aha moments that you think we’ll resonant with as entrepreneurs. Take us to that moment in time that you had that epiphany and tell us that story.

Ryan Stewman: Well, this is going to get real quick, right, because in 2014 I was going through a divorce with the mother of my oldest son, right? And when we were going through the divorce, we’re about a year into it and when you’re going through a divorce they’re evaluating your assets, how much your company’s worth, things of that nature, and my lawyer calls me. And he says, “Hey man, I got good news. You’re not going to have to come off that much money because according to them they evaluated your business and it’s worth nothing.”

And I’m like, “Whoa.” I’m having mixed emotions here. You talk about the bipolar alarms going off left and right. I’m happy I’m not going to have to come off any money, but then I’m like, “Wait; what I’ve built for the last four years is useless? Tell me more about what I’m doing wrong over here, right?”

And so he goes on to say – he’s like, “Well, let’s just face it, dude, you ride a motorcycle two or three times a week. If somebody runs over you and you die your consulting clients are going to pay you for maybe another month out of sympathy for your family, but that’s it. Then your money stream’s cut off.”

And he’s like, “You don’t have any debt. That’s good. But at the same time you’re only as good as your next deal.”

And I’m like, “Wow, man, I never really thought about that.”

So I hired my neighbor actually who’s one of the best CPAs in the country. He’s taken bunches of companies, billions of dollars, all this stuff, he’s in downtown Dallas here. I go talk to him and he teaches me because I have this conversation with him like this is what the lawyer told me and I don’t want to do this. I want to leave a legacy for my kid because if I do die his mom’s going to need money to take care of him, this, that, and the other. And it was like a scary moment for me, right?

And he lined me out. He said, “Ryan, you’ve got to stop thinking like a salesman and start thinking like a CEO.” And boy, that was like a stab to my heart. Like, “You don’t know me, Gene. I’m a salesman. You don’t know me. You don’t talk to me that way. I am a salesman. I go on strikes against CEOs. I make CEOs money. We hire contract CEOs over here. Screw those guys.”

But he’s like, “No, seriously. Nobody that’s ever worked a billion dollar deal with me has ever said that they’re a salesman first. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur you’re going to have to think like a CEO.”

And we put a plan in place to where I hired employees and contractors and affiliates and all these other people and created digital products out of all the videos and webinars and trainings and everything else that I had one. And that was really A.) a pivotal moment where my business took off, but also it was a moment where if I died right now or something happened to me and I was put out of work, I’ve got an operations manager, I’ve got an affiliate manager, I’ve got a booking manager, I’ve got a business handler, I’ve got a contract CEO that knows the whole business inside and out, I’ve got CPAs, lawyers, I have everything in place that makes me an actual business. We have CRMs, all these other assets.

And you think about it, when someone comes in as an entrepreneur we ultimately want to sell our businesses off and retire on the beach somewhere and drink Mai Tais all day, right? But many times it’s just us and we get so caught up in our ego, we’re like, “Oh well, the business revolves around me. I’m the consultant, the coach, the rock star, the IT guy, whatever it is that we do as an entrepreneur,” but if you go away you have to think about it. What goes away with you?

And nowadays I’m excited that aha moment put me into a place where not only doing what the smarter people than me told me to do, which is always a good habit to create, right? But not only doing that with Gene and all my CPA and lawyer and everything else put in place, but like I said if something happens to me then I’m leaving a legacy like Napoleon Hill and Zig Ziglar. I’ve got assets that people can continue to sell for decades that will pay for my family and my son. Should anything unfortunately happen to me everybody’s going to be taken care of.

John Lee Dumas: I love that phrase, “Stop thinking like a salesman. Start thinking like a CEO.” And Fire Nation, there’s a great book that was actually one of the pivotal books in my journey as an entrepreneur called E-Myth Revisited. And in that book the author talks a lot about the fact that hey, just because you like baking doesn’t mean you should open up a bakery. Just because you’re a great carpenter doesn’t mean you should open up a furniture store because you’re like a salesman in those areas. You’re baking great bread. Maybe you shouldn’t be running a whole bakery because you’ll stop doing that thing. You’ll stop baking that bread because you have other things now to focus on. But for us as entrepreneurs that are building bigger, larger, more profitable businesses and leverage and scalable, we need to start thinking like that CEO and becoming that CEO and building entities around us knowing exactly what are strengths are and Ryan knows exactly what his strengths are. He amplifies those things and then he outsourced the rest so that we have the time, energy, and bandwidth to make the most of our very limited time.

Now, I want to shift a little bit, Ryan because to me looking at you on stage, I was like, “That guy had a ton of weaknesses, but he looks like he’s figured it all out at this point.” But we both know that’s not true. What would you say your biggest current weakness is as an entrepreneur?

Ryan Stewman: I’m short tempered. So a lot of people come to me and I guess I should say I’m quick to judge. Maybe it’s the time I did in prison or whatever, right, being skeptical of everybody that talks to you. But I dismiss people really quick. And that’s a weakness of an entrepreneur because oftentimes people do have good ventures, but we see so many BS proposals and everything else that we don’t have time to research anybody. And my biggest weakness is I probably don’t give enough outsiders a chance, I guess, if that makes sense.

I’m sure you get a lot of messages, too of people sending you proposals, people want to do business, JVs, all this other stuff and I’m quick to dismiss them. And that’s a big weakness because I should probably look into them a little bit more, but it gets kind of frustrating. People are like, “Hey, can you help me sell my stuff?” Or, “Can you do this?” And I’m just really quick – kind of what they say about mean Dan Kennedy, do you know what I mean? He’s quick to dismiss you. You got to go through all these things and fax them if you really want to work with him and stuff like that.

And I’m kind of the same way, not that I’m modeling him on that, just by nature. And it really is a big weakness because I’m sure I’m leaving a lot of money on the table and missing out because of that.

John Lee Dumas: Yeah. I mean, my recommendation for you in that situation would be – listen – it’s time for you to hire an opportunities manager guy where you’re just forwarding those emails to him. He or she actually knows what is best for you and what’s best for your business. And coming up with maybe three to four that you can sit down a week and just say, “Hey, I’m going to skim through these three. They’ve been vetted. These are legitimate opportunities. Maybe one of them or maybe just one of them per month makes sense to actually go forward” because your time is money. Your energy is money. And every time you take on a JV, what are you doing? You’re potentially siphoning off a section of your audience you’ve worked so hard to build, so those should be very difficult and very focused decisions and maybe shouldn’t be all on your plate.

But on the flipside, what’s your biggest strength?

Ryan Stewman: Unlike most entrepreneurs, I have the ability to focus on one thing and one thing only until it’s done. So I have 32 streams of income between digital products, the real estate that I own, the companies that I own, all these other different things, right? But I didn’t get all of these at once. I’m not your typical serial entrepreneur where I’ve got my hands in all these things trying to juggle them. Over the last six years I’ve got one thing dialed in with about six months at a time I’ll get one thing dialed in, it’s working perfect and then I’ll create something that allows me to piggyback on the original thing that I dialed in.

So I have a consulting business and I’ve recorded webinars to train people, so then we packaged all the webinars up, turned them into a digital product, right? I speak on podcasts and from the stage and stuff, I needed something where people could find me in one place that I own the URL, so we started Clyxo. There’s all these different things from the wheel. I run ads for real estate offices, so I needed to own a real estate office so I could run my own ads or just kind of things like that.

And over the last, like I said, six years it’s all added up, but that’s my biggest strength is I’ve worked on each one of these deals until it’s done. That way I can say that I have all these streams of income coming in right now that are running themselves or that have the right people in place running them because I stayed from start to finish. A lot of people, especially as entrepreneurs and salespeople, will start one thing and then something else will get us excited and then we won’t go back to the one thing. The next thing, you look up, you’ve got a hundred unfinished things whereas if you had just finished one, it would be already printing you money.

John Lee Dumas: Well, Ryan I have a banner hanging over my computer right now. It just says, “Focus. Follow One Course Until Success.” I’m a huge fan, a huge proponent of that lazar focus. It’s really been the reason for my success as well. And for you, you have a lot of things that have become successful, Ryan, but what’s the one thing today that has you most fired up?

Ryan Stewman: We’re about to drop a new program called Phone Funnels. And really what’s got me fired up is the fact that I see the future, right? Like I talked about on stage on Funnel Hacking, I see that 92 percent of my traffic, which I have a blog that gets half a million views a month, right, I see all this traffic that’s coming from mobile. So what’s got me fired up is we’re putting apps on people’s phones, we’re being able to reach out with our phone and text the people that get our app, we’re able to run adds on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and Instagram that’s getting us a lot of – we’re seeing so much activity with our apps and mobile phone stuff that it’s unreal. So it’s really gotten me fired up.

As a matter of fact, the last five weeks – I didn’t mention this on stage, but in the last five weeks with my app that we’re using on the phone, I’ve got 11, 400 leads.

John Lee Dumas: Wow.

Ryan Stewman: So I see the future. I’m onto something here, right? And so that’s what’s got me excited because we’re working on that product right now. It should be out in the next two weeks. And last night I just kind of sneakily posted about it on Facebook and we had 60 people at $997.00, 60 people sign up and pay last night and we don’t even have it finished yet. They’re just like, “Hey, we want to be the first ones.”

John Lee Dumas: Wow.

Ryan Stewman: So you could do that for one post on Facebook like $60,000.00, all right.

John Lee Dumas: Now, by the time this interview goes live that will be live, so where can Fire Nation find out more about Phone Funnels?

Ryan Stewman: PhoneFunnels.co

John Lee Dumas: PhoneFunnels.co, Fire Nation. We’re about to drag you through the lightening round kicking and screaming, but we’re going to first take a minute to thank our sponsors.

Ryan, are you prepared for the lightening round?

Ryan Stewman: Absolutely. Let’s do it.

John Lee Dumas: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Ryan Stewman: I wasn’t listening to the universe.

John Lee Dumas: What is the best advice you’ve ever been received?

Ryan Stewman: Stop thinking like a salesman and start thinking like a CEO.

John Lee Dumas: What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Ryan Stewman: I live and die every day by a schedule.

John Lee Dumas: Share an internet resource like Evernote with Fire Nation.

Ryan Stewman: HardcoreCloser.com.

John Lee Dumas: If you could recommend one book for our listeners, what would it be and why?

Ryan Stewman: Well, I would recommend my book Bulletproof Business that just came out on Amazon last month and it will basically walk you through all the mistakes that I made and I am a prolific mistake maker, so you’ll be able to learn from my mistakes so that you can avoid them in your business. Plus, it will entertain you because like you’ve said a few times in the show here, I’ve got a lot of stories.

John Lee Dumas: You’ve got a lot of stories. Is Bulletproof Business in Audible?

Ryan Stewman: Not yet.

John Lee Dumas: Ryan, you get on a bunch of podcasts, brother. Make that one of your focuses.

Ryan Stewman: I’m an action taker. Say no more.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, I know that you love audio, so I teamed up with Audible and if you haven’t already you can get an amazing audio book for free, soon Bulletproof Business will be available, at EOFireBook.com.

Ryan, this is the last question of the lightening round, but it is a doozy, brother. Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning in a brand new world identical to earth, but you knew no one. You still have all the experience and knowledge you currently have. Your food and shelter’s taken care of, but all you have is a laptop and $500.00. What would you do in the next seven days?

Ryan Stewman: I would record a video of myself with a sales pitch, right? I would run $350.00 worth of ads on Facebook and the video sales pitch would just simply be, “Hey, work with me.” Or, “Here’s how you can solve whatever problem” because you didn’t say that the same problems didn’t exist in this other place, so I would just say, “Hey, I solve X, Y, Z problem. Fill out the link below. We’ll get on the phone.” And I’d start thinking like a salesman again and close a few of them, get some money together, and continue to bankroll that just like I have this whole time.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, we are going to end this interview on fire, just like we started, with a parting piece of guidance from you, Ryan, the best way that we can connect with you, and then we’ll say goodbye.

Ryan Stewman: The place to find me is Clyxo.com/Closer, That’s C-L-Y-X-O.com/Closer. And then while you’re there sign up. It’s free. I own the stuff. You’ll love it.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you’ve been hanging out with Ryan and J.L.D. today, so keep up the heat. And Ryan, give us that parting piece of guidance.

Ryan Stewman: Like I was saying earlier, you need to stay focused on one thing at a time, see one thing all the way through whether it be a funnel or a project or an advertisement or an idea or whatever, see one thing through all the way to the end, wait until it starts producing money and then move on to the next thing. That will be the best thing you can do because entrepreneurial ADD can cost you a lot of money.

John Lee Dumas: Fire Nation, head over to EOFire.com, just type Ryan in the search bar, his show notes page will pop up with everything that we’ve been talking about and Ryan, let me know if I miss something, but you got PhoneFunnels.co it’s already out there. Check it out. You have HardcoreCloser.com. Go directly to his website. His book Bulletproof Business will soon be available in Audible because you’re podcast listeners. I know you love audio. And, of course, Clyxo, C-L-Y-X-O.com/Closer is where you can get all the goods about Ryan and while you’re there sign up. Did I miss anything Ryan?

Ryan Stewman: That’s it, man. Lots to plug. I’m a busy guy.

John Lee Dumas: Boom. Love it, brother. Well, listen, Ryan, thank you.