- It's the same style. - But really only have like three to four hours of golden energy, right? It's like when you're in flow, when you can build things with all the clients that we work with, one of the things that we do is help them build an ideal week. Helps you kind of pinpoint when do you have the most energy and then putting the most important stuff during that time. (air whooshing) - Okay, let's do it. - Let's do it. - Welcome back to Inspired Leadership. My name is Tyler Bailey. I'm here with Susan Power. We were talking about the transformative power that people have when they apply AI to their companies, to their business. And we are showing you a prime example of what you can do. It doesn't matter how old you are, it doesn't matter what you're doing, almost every single service out there, every single company can utilize the power of AI. And we have a fantastic guest to show you just that. Today we're talking to Ryan Brazl. He's journey exemplifies the transformative power of grit, innovation, and visionary leadership. From humble beginnings and Tennessee to scaling seven, to eight figure companies, Ryan has mastered the art bending time by leveraging technology, building exceptional teams. As the founder of Assistant Launch and the boundless AI Mastermind, he stands at the forefront of AI-driven entrepreneurship, empowering founders to reclaim their time and achieve exponential growth. Let's hop into the interview with Ryan Brazl. - Ryan, thank you so much for being on the Inspired Leadership Podcast. - Thanks, Tyler. - Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. - And we'll operate in here. What does, it's a, well, this is a question that we ask everybody on the cast because it's a theme. We're trying to develop the definition of inspired leadership by helping people bring their own experiences. So what does inspired leadership mean to you? And how do you bring that into your work? - Yeah, I used to think that inspired leadership in general, it used to mean something different to me 10 years ago, seven years ago, even when I kind of first started my current company. Now, I used to think that it meant that I tended to everybody's needs and I would, there's all the things that you try in your journey through trying to figure out how to become a good leader. And I think what I have distilled it down to now, what inspired leadership means to me is you have to live, you have to live it. Like you have to live the things and be the person that you want to be. A good example is like two years ago, I started noticing that my team was showing up three minutes late to every meeting. My, my COO was running his meetings three minutes late. And I'd see and slack, hey guys, let's jump in. And I'm like, why is this guy not starting our meetings all the time, makes no sense? It was because that's what I was doing. And so I think inspired leadership to me looks like doing the work to become the best person that you can be, the best version of yourself that you can be and then inspiring your team to be that as well. At least, at the scale of the team that I have, that's what works really well. We are the things we're using. I like using the ideas of, you know, leading by example, it can resonate the vision as that of what you're trying to do. Yeah. Yeah, I really liked that. You're kind of the heartbeat of, you know, founders of the heartbeat of the organization. And it's even at, even at larger organizations as well. It's you, you're the one who sets the tone for everything. So Ryan, can you introduce us? I know I know you from Dan Martell's Entrepreneur Group lead entrepreneurs, but for our listeners that may not have met you, can you kind of introduce yourself your business? And maybe you can tell us a little bit about, how buying back time is central to your, your approach. Yeah, yeah. I have a very checkered past having been somebody that I've always had many different interests. And it took, took me a few years into my entrepreneurial journey to really hone in and focus on my gifts and my skillset. For me, my journey started actually when I grew up, I grew up in Tennessee. And so Tennessee didn't have a very big tech entrepreneurship presence. It was very, you know, just like handshake deals and people are doing real estate, but not a lot of like, for me, my brain is stimulated by technology and optimization and process and systems and all that. So I worked with this company for, there's a company called the Shureen and they're the largest insurance back in provider for every major mobile phone care in the world. And I worked on their fulfillment automation system. So when an order is placed until the moment that it goes out the door, you know, 12 to 24 hours later, all of the infrastructure and technology. And it was, it was really stimulating, but I'm a terrible employee. And I was constantly trying to innovate things that they didn't want me to innovate and working, and many times I had leaders that were like, you're gonna work yourself out of a job or whatever, right? So at some point, I started hearing about the world of the internet of things and that back 10 years ago was like, oh, wow, what if your oven could connect to the internet and you could, you know, change settings on the go and things like that. And I thought it was fascinating. So I was like, I'm gonna move to California. I picked everything up, moved left and kind of started my entrepreneurial journey out here, started a couple of different companies and started doing systems consulting. So working with founders, helping them optimize their processes specifically by leveraging technology. So you can think of like, Zapier and things like that back when that was really popular, just making businesses run more efficiently because that's how my brain thinks. I love to look at the high-level operations of small, medium-sized businesses and then go, what is happening here? And what would you like to happen? And then what stands in the balance there, like what are the gaps that exist? And so I did that for a long time and started several other, I started a battery technology company with some friends of mine. And it wasn't until I moved into something called the Entrepreneur House. And maybe you guys, I don't know how young some of your guests are on this podcast, but when I was 28, I moved into this house in San Diego, where there's six founders, all of them had 10, 20, 30 million dollar companies and very successful. And I was the lowest person in the total poll. And you go through this application process, you get invited in and I got this offer, I dropped everything and I was like, I'm gonna live in this house. And it's essentially like an incubator. So you think of weekly masterminds, meetings, big dinners every month where you fly in investors, so we take quarterly retreats to do goal setting and planning. We had people film documentaries and stuff about the house, we were in Entrepreneur Magazine, like very, very, - Wow. - Yeah, it was a very, - That's cool. - Yeah, yeah, it was fun. And we, essentially it's this place where we're all aligned on core values. It kind of runs like a business. It's like everybody's aligned on core values. Everybody knows what your goals are each month. And you're facing your peers, every single day when you come up and down the stairs and they're like, okay, did you do your, did you film your videos? Did you do-- - 24/7 accountability partners. - Oh my gosh. 24/7. So that was a really wild journey. And during that time, interestingly enough, I was experimenting with some businesses that I wanted to start. And I had lived through working with Asurian, I had lived in the Philippines, and I was training teams there and I spent some time there and I realized that there was this difference and opinion between people's experience working with overseas talent and in the US and my experience. And so, you know, I, it had been probably five or six years since I had been there. And I noticed that all the founders I was living with in this house, very successful. Some of them had, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars exits like, this was a wild environment. So you can imagine there's a lot of like, really interesting people that grew their businesses coming out of this. But yeah, it was one of those things where I saw, almost every single one of them, their, the administrative side of their lives was in shambles. So, you know, the people they were dating, they're not going on dates. Just everything is like falling through the cracks, email, calendar, all that. And I decided that I could probably create a good system for solving this problem that would be kind of effortless and no one else was really doing it. There was like the Tim Ferris era of four hour work week, go get a VA, handles tasks, et cetera. But then there's this world of executive assistance. Like you need somebody who's like Dan talks about this a lot. You need somebody who can own your calendar, your email and parts of your personal life and things like that. So Ryan, did you sign up all of the residents at the entrepreneur house when you were there or were you just starting the business then? Some of them, but always funny. I told them that I was like, all right guys, I got this idea. I'm going to launch it and we're going to launch, we're going to do it next quarter, so four months, I'm going to get everything prepped. And one of my friends, he goes,
now you're doing it in 11 days and and I've got a conference coming up and you're going to come speak at the conference as a subject matter expert and next thing I knew 11 days later I'm at a conference with a piece of paper having never done this before and I'm speaking to these people and that's where our initial customers came from so we were profitable from day one and it was a it was that's the power of this environment of being around other peers. Cool. Yeah. I got to so as somebody who's you know built and scaled multiple companies how does effective time management foster inspired leadership and long-term success so how do you why is effective time management important? I spoke on this on a podcast a couple of weeks ago and I think that time management is important but I think more important is energy management because I tried every possible way every possible permutation of managing my time and energy and I've realized that you really only have like three to four hours of solid we call it golden energy all right call it golden energy right it's like when you're in flow when you can build things when you can create things you're having your best conversations ideas are flowing like when your world powers that it's highest in a way that kind of yeah yeah so the way that I see time and energy management is the things that like for example when I'm meeting with my team and we're going over really important things like I want to do that during my optimal windows of energy and with with all the clients that we work with one of the things that we do is help them build an ideal weak structure which helps you kind of pinpoint during the week when do you have the most energy and then putting the most important stuff during that time. Let's let's look at this and let's dive in quickly what is one thing that our listeners can do maybe today to really find that optimal window for them what's one thing they you do to help your employees or what's what I mean there's probably a whole list of things that they do but what's one thing that they can say okay here's a place I can start Dan talks about this in his book it's just I mean you can take an inventory of your week and go through and outline you know what are you doing every 15 minutes and then at a very simple level just putting a plus or minus is this giving me energy or taking me taking my energy do I have a lot of energy right now or am I drained right now and I started noticing that around you know post lunch the way that my body processes food notice that there's this dip that I just don't put certain tasks during that window right so I think doing an inventory of I mean this is a complicated subject because it's not just it's not just consistent every single like depends on the activity that you're doing you could be working on you could spend 90 minutes doing admin on a Monday and you could be totally energized by that or totally drained it kind of depends like it's it's about aligning the actual activities and the window of time right so you say you suggest the first thing to do is really start just inventorying those those experiences you have plus or minus and that's great great place to do it just get it like what I do now all the time is I as I go about the world I'm taking an inventory of what gives me energy what is taking my energy what is me you know and I'm now just optimizing for more of the things that give me energy so I love having conversations with people things like that yeah you know just a funny funny related comment what gives me the most energy is engaging with my team and meeting with my team and I want to ask them how they feel about that hopefully they would say it's the same for them I'm hoping they would give me the honest feedback but really like when you think about developing your team I think ideally everyone that's a people leader that would give them energy for them to truly care and want to do that with their team AI if we can pivot to AI a little bit what advice you have for leaders to use that to optimize their time and operations there's a there's a ton of I mean I've been in this space for over two years with founders we have a mastermind that we put together there's hundreds of people the short answer to that question would be if you're a business owner and you there's two parts one is if you're a business owner and you don't know anything about AI and you don't have any kind of strategy around how to leverage AI in your business go find a peer group go one thing that we've been doing is go find like go get a Twitter account and just start following all the people that talk about AI stuff and just check in on it once or twice a day so develop your own mini mastermind so you can just keep up the date with what's happening as an example just yesterday Google Gemini released a feature where your screen you can have AI essentially to simplify it it's on your computer it sees what you're seeing and you can interact and say okay cool and so how would I run that regression analysis on these you know on this spreadsheet here whatever it is so yeah it's evolving really fast so that's the first thing that your peer group find a mastermind and just because I say this I say that's very seriously like if you don't people will get absolutely steamrolled every single industry is like and the second thing is I think there's it for a practical approach so you're not overwhelmed with you know overwhelmed with all that you can do with AI I think if you look at two two things in your business to apply AI to one would be how can you apply AI to your revenue function so like sales how can you you know sales enablement things like that so digging a little deep into where there are inefficiencies in your sales process I gave a talk to Kyle Van Borses group the other day on some ways to do that but looking at sales and then so that's just one thing and then the other one thing would be looking at your operational processes and seeing if there's one thing you can do to just speed up your your operational efficiency by even 10 to 20% and then over time the two changes that you make compound we made a change to our sales process where we use AI after a sales call to generate proposals and really targeted follow-ups and we saw 34% increase in conversions in one month which is that's a nice uptick it is for you and you can do that if you're in the right environment like I didn't know anything about AI prior to two and a half years ago and I've just learned with my other fellow founder friends and constantly you know we're building we're sharing stories all that stuff so those are two things I think they could people could do daily practice it sounds like yeah yeah let's dive a little bit into two daily practice actually how do you Ryan maintain inspiration how do you maintain your drive I mean some people wake up in the mind to say not today right but how do you keep going as a leader while navigating all these challenges and growth and innovation I'll be honest even earlier this one I mean this this happens everybody earlier this morning I had a rough night's sleep and normally I sleep really well and I have a series of little prescriptions I call them right that I can do to get back into peak state so one of them is is just focusing on gratitude so I'm literally in the shower and I'm going I'm grateful for this I'm grateful for that I'm grateful for this it sounds so simple but it works I also have really spent the last year focusing on mindset I think it's the final frontier for anyone whose performance success oriented I have read all the books I have you know I've listened to all the podcasts I've you know hired mentors and I think the final frontier is it's something that I do every day I have it there's a Tony Robbins priming video it's on YouTube you can look it up Tony Robbins priming combined it's great yeah fantastic yeah you just it starts by putting yourself in a good state of mind so you're you're kind of like recounting good memories and then once you're in that good state your subconscious mind you're essentially training your subconscious to feel the emotions of having done the thing that you're you know your goal right so for me one of our goals is like our company hitting extra revenue or my fiance and I I'm picturing the day that we walked down the aisle 18 months from now and what our relationship looks like and so when you start to feel the emotions of the thing that you want your your actions then start to align with things that get you towards those goals and so like I show up in my relationship more grounded more patient more cut because I my subconscious mind can't tell the difference between that thing have being actually true and the thoughts so that's where my big focus is this year is just going down that rabbit hole and I you know it's you can read Joe dispenses book you can read think and grow rich things like that it's it's really fast it's really fast I love that book by the way if you're coming super natural. That's a fantastic eye opener. If you guys feel
if you haven't picked that one up. - Ooh, good. - Yeah. - All this stuff. It's confusing at first. It doesn't make sense. But once you realize that there is a scientific explanation for why this works, that was when I was like, I'm so, I'm gonna be doing this. - Right. - Speaking of mindset shifts, a lot of leaders need to learn how to let go if they wanna scale a business. You need to get your team to take on activities and delegation being kind of the first step in that process. What advice would you have for a leader to make that mindset shift to end or to build the system that can help them let go and focus on the high impact work? - One, you have to have the right people on your team that you trust and they can actually do the job. I mean, that's part of it. Some people just grind away trying to get results out of people that aren't actually the right people for the job. They don't enjoy it. They're not a good fit for it. Two is your Dan talks about this a lot. We're very systems oriented. And so that means that there should be no question on how something in our business gets done. And if anybody were to leave this role, someone else could come and pick it up and take it away easily. And so that's the very, very similar to how Dan talks about it in his book. You've got a video showing how the process is done. You've got a really simple document that can be easily edited if necessary that walks through the process. And then like Dan always says too, you inspect what you expect. So once you hand over that responsibility, occasionally having you or one of your leaders checking in on that process, making sure it's going well. But from a mindset perspective, I think like it's not just immediate. I think it's 100% a skill and a muscle that you have to build and develop over time. And we take that responsibility on with a lot of clients that we work with. We're like, we're going to give you the process and systems and the person. But it's going to be up to you to sort of lean into this and practice. And I think it's very, very difficult to be successful as a leader if you can't put the reps in and really master the skill of delegation. It's hard, very, very hard. - It's so important that they learn to do that to get the value out of a virtual assistant, right? 'Cause if they're still in there checking the emails, just trying to emails is going to probably frustrate the VA and they're not going to get their value either. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, VA, anyone, even your leadership team, I mean, I funny enough, I just hired somebody on our team recently that their previous employer was, they were losing people that directly reported to the CEO, they were losing headcount like every week someone was leaving and it was because of this issue of just not knowing how to delegate, not knowing how to communicate. And yeah, as a founder, if you don't figure this out, you will lose really good people to other people that know how to do it and can treat your team right. - Yeah, so these strategies that you have, what strategies would you say have been the most effective for building a strong personal and professional network to support your vision? - Earlier in my journey, I was very much like, I need to figure out how to make this happen for me and I just, you know, I've got, it was way more me focused and then I realized that I got much more fulfillment out of helping other people and that also helps to grow a network and build relationships. So I regularly spend time every week reaching out to different people to help them in different areas where I am skilled. I don't, I'm not like in super philanthropic as far as like with my money, but with my time, I'm definitely helping younger entrepreneurs, I'm helping people that are in different stages of their business. I might talk to someone yesterday who were in their early 60s that needed help figuring out how to better leverage systems to make things flow better. So I offer up a lot of my time to help people and the other thing that I find myself doing quite often is like I look for seeds of opportunity within people. I think the thing, I don't know that everybody appreciates this about me necessarily, but I am that person in my community that sort of raises everybody's average. And so some people hate you for that. Other people are really appreciative of it, but I think that's my thing is I really like building relationships with people that are open to growing and open to becoming something better than where they're at right now and like truly living out the best version of themselves. And so I'm regularly trying to help and coach people in that way too. And I think that is something that I don't know, I've built a lot of really cool relationships off of that. Ryan, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and your company and what you're up to? - I am going pro, as Dan says, on Instagram right now. So I'm putting out a lot of content that's hopefully really helpful for people around mindset and fighting back time and systems and all that. So Instagram is my biggest platform. I'm also on LinkedIn and then people can email me. My email's not hard to find. - Thank you so much for all your support over the past year. We love making this podcast and we welcome you to send it to a friend. Send it to a family member. Share it with someone in your life who you think may benefit from a bit of inspiration about how they show up, at work, outside of work. And if you know a guest that you think we should invite to be on the Inspired Leadership Podcast, shoot me an email at
[email protected]. Until next time, stay inspired. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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