How Ryan Naylor Went From Shark Tank Failure To Tech Success Story: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the ideal destination for business professionals with great shows like Hustle and Flowcharts. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how Ryan Naylor went from Shark Tank failure to tech success story. To drop these value bombs, we have brought Ryan into EO Fire Studios. Ryan is the founder of VIVAHR, a platform for entrepreneurs to publish their open positions and get organic visibility on all the top job sites. In today's foundation, our value bombs are the quickest ways to get A players to leave your company is to hire a bunch of C players.

0:41And when you grow a business, it's not sexy to have a ton of people work for you. What's truly sexy is to have a fully purpose-based business with complete alignment within your organization and how to get there. And oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ryan and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business, and the media landscape is fragmented.

1:16The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Ryan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? I am super excited to be here. And probably the biggest thing that I believe in is to build a great business, stop focusing on relationships. And where I come back is focus on value. I see so many friends starting a business and they get into networking groups and they focus on going to just building relationships, building a bunch of friends.

2:01And my feedback to them is you've got friends, you've got a lot of relationships, focus on adding value to prospects. And that's where you get the best return on your time spent. Ryan, you're hitting upon one of my all-time favorite quotes from a Mr. Albert Einstein, which is try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value because that Fire Nation is the key. What value are you providing to the world? What solutions are you bringing to people's real problems? And man, that's a great lesson. And I want to start off with some more lessons for Fire Nation because you were a bust on Shark Tank.

2:42And so what did you learn from that whole experience? It's hard to swallow and say I was a bust on Shark Tank, but it's true. One of the biggest lessons I learned is the power of having a purpose-based company to drive you. And I'll back up just a little bit to tell you that when I was on Shark Tank, I was there pitching a product. I was pitching a product that I thought was really cool. I'd found in Italy and really expanded on this product in the United States. and when I was out there and I had Mark Cuban and you know everybody just kind of coming on my shoulders I really found myself digging in focused on I know who I am and what they're saying isn't directed at me it's directed at the product and I found myself not being able to defend the product because it wasn't purposeful it didn't it didn't drive me it was just a means to an end it was just a transaction.

3:43And so the biggest lesson I learned is probably that night when I went back to the hotel room after being on Shark Tank, they put you up in a hotel after you record your episode. And I pulled out one of those pads of paper on the hotel desk and I just started writing, what do I believe in? What is my motivators? And I listed it all out. And honestly, that's where I found myself. That's what I learned the most is focus on what drives you. What is your purpose? And do things that are going to magnify your purpose. And what did that look like? Like what were some of those words on that piece of paper?

4:21The words that I found myself circling at the end, because I did, I went underline and I circled the things that were the deepest for me. and it really came back to family. And I really am a huge advocate for the family unit. I'm a passionate believer that as a society, we are better when we have a family. And families look a lot different today than they will tomorrow or the next day. But whatever your family environment looks like, own it, make it better, be proud of that and build upon it. And I found myself struggling to basically align my previous company to those core values, to my personal core values.

5:07And that's ultimately kind of what led me to what I'm doing today. But I don't want to jump the gun too much, but core values and having purpose, you just sleep a lot better at night and you become – you're on fire like this podcast, right? You come to work every day ready to roar and be the best version of yourself when you truly believe in those values. It's so true because no matter how much success you're going to have in any field, Fire Nation, there's going to come a time where you look up one day and be like, what am I doing? What is it that I'm actually doing? What value am I actually providing?

5:43What solutions am I actually creating for real, meaningful problems in this world? and if you can't get excited or feel passionate or moved by the answer to that question you're going to have, it's really going to be this very difficult journey for you going forward. In fact, it's probably going to result in a pivot or an adjustment at that point. So why not start there? Why not start with something that you believe in that's really in your heart of heart and your gut of guts, what I like to call your zone of fire, where your passions overlap with your value, where your enthusiasm intersects with your skill set?

6:18Like how can you not want to try to start there right now instead of having that really unfortunate wake-up moment maybe months, years down the road of like, what exactly am I doing? Now, you are, Ryan, on Entrepreneurs on Fire. So let's break it down. How'd you go from that Shark Tank bust to tech entrepreneur on fire? I truly believe it's that purpose. It was that motivator. I was able to come up with a business model that supported my core value, which is supporting families. I started researching what is it that breaks up families? What is making the walls of a home crumble? And I found that one of the top leading contributions of that is unemployment and underemployment.

7:01And you think about that, you break it down a little bit more like financial pressures, what that does to relationships and how it might create a sense of distrust or self-esteem, self-worth might be diminished. And I wanted to do something about that. And so I went from there and started building a job board. I wanted to create something that drove people to find better employment that was focused on my passions, which is company culture. How can I help other people find great businesses aligned with their values and their company culture and started building it up. And over the next six years, I built a job board out of Arizona.

7:40called Local Work that ultimately we were able to track back and had over 100 ,000 people get jobs directly through our platform with this purpose-based mission. And to really celebrate that, we did some research. We started asking our question, why? Why were people having so much success with localwork.com? What were employers doing, big businesses, small businesses? Was it because they were name brand companies? And the answer was no, it was because the companies that actually had the most impacts in attracting the best people and getting the best hires, they focused on storytelling. They focused on culture, telling transparently, not what you're going to do for me, but what we can accomplish together.

8:25And as a small entrepreneur, that just hit me so hard that I could go back and I could see statistically in my face, the companies that focus on telling who they are, but more importantly, what they do and why they do it in the job posting had 500 % increase in applicants. I mean, it was staggering. And so from there, it was easy. It was like, I got to build a product that helps more small businesses do this over and over again. And we need to go nationwide. And, and that's really kind of what lit me in it. And all of it comes back to one thing, John, it's my passion. It's my purpose. And when I can, when I can work late into the night, get up early in the morning, be super excited and have all the energy in the world.

9:11It's because I'm super passionate about what I'm doing. Such a game changer. And Fire Nation, think of the alternative. I mean, think about you not having that passion or excitement to wake up in the morning to do your thing. Who is your competition? Somebody who is loving doing that thing, who's waking up in the morning wanting to get to work, can't wait to get to work. They're going to win every single time. So again, why not just start there? And I love some of those key phrases that Ryan used, storytelling, culture, transparency. Remember these things, Fire Nation. They really matter. And we have so much more value coming up about you, Fire Nation, improving your hiring and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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10:32Add to all this, re-imagine marketing and content hubs with new ways to create breakthrough content, updated features to generate better leads, and support to help up-level your marketing and revenue forecast. And you've got HubSpot's all-on-one customer platform. Get ready for growth without the growing pains. Visit HubSpot.com slash Spotlight to see all the updates. Ryan, we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break, I want you to break down with all of your vast experience and knowledge, how Fire Nation can start improving their hiring right now. This is something that's going to be so different for every company, but I will say one of the biggest improvements that I made for myself when growing my company and hiring people, as well as coaching other businesses, is to start with a job scorecard.

11:20Sit down and ask yourselves, what are the three to four key metrics I'm going to measure success in this role? When I come back and I look at this candidate in 90 days, how do I quickly quantitatively see this is success? This is somebody that did their job right. And then I'm going to start measuring what are the three to five things that impact those KPIs. Creating your scorecard, now that becomes your job description. That becomes how you transparently disclose exactly what's expected of them. So many times I see entrepreneurs go out there and they find a quick template and I not against templates, but they'll find a quick template.

12:03And then they're shocked when the new employees frustrated because they're like, this isn't anything that I applied to. You're asking me to do things that are completely opposite of what I expected. And then it creates contention right out the gate. And I think one of the biggest things is create a scorecard for each individual job. And I will always say, anchor it to core values. What do you believe in as the entrepreneur? If you're leading that ship, if you're guiding it, put that in the job posting. Talk about what you believe in. Do you believe in making sure you support your kids' soccer teams on the weekends?

12:40Put that in there. You make sure you're home in time for your daughter's piano recital, put that in there so that there's clear understanding and alignment of what you value and what they can value so that there's full transparency day one. Create a job scorecard, Fire Nation. I love that concept. We're talking three to four metrics that you are going to use soon, maybe 90 days after hiring to measure their success. And guess what? Now you're actually setting them up for success because now they know what's expected of them and it's clear communication. There's clarity the whole way through. And again, I love how you ended that anchoring it to your core values.

13:20Always have that anchored to your core values. And something that you've done that fits everything that we've been talking about here today with passion, with value, with your knowledge to become this tech entrepreneur on fire, you are the founder of Viva HR. So what is Viva HR and why is it making such a splash in this world today? You know, Viva HR, we really kind of going back to the story, we wanted to build a product and Viva kind of, you know, stands for kind of bringing things to life. We really wanted companies to bring their company to life through their job postings. One of my favorite companies here based out of Arizona is a company called Nextiva.

14:03And they're a voiceover IP company. There's a bunch of telecom community, you know, companies all around. But I was able to go in and work with them and observe them when they were 18 employees. Now I think there are over a thousand employees. And they had Nerf guns going off and gongs in the corner. They're banging on drums. There was a, you know, and I was just like, this is incredible. How are you guys able to maintain such this incredible culture. And it really came down to we live our core values from the very first moment somebody interacts with us all the way through their training, their onboarding, their day-to-day with us.

14:41And that's what Viva HR is, is we want to help tell that story. So when you post a job and it publishes out to all the different job boards on ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Glassdoor, wherever the job gets published out to, Viva HR is growing because we tell that story. We have a proprietary way where someone sees your job on Indeed. When they click on it, they get to a dedicated page talking about the company culture that you created. It talks about your core values and it creates that emotional alignment. So we trademarked a phrase called culture marketing and it's all about how do you tell your story through culture?

15:20How do you market your business? How do you market your open jobs through culture? And that's game changer. That's going to get you, that's going to go from you hiring C players to A players. The quickest way to get A players to leave your company is to hire a bunch of C players. The greatest way to keep A players is to hire more A players. And so we truly believe that aligning and hiring the best of the best is really going to be the difference. Fire Nation, what kind of company are you trying to build? Are you trying to build a company that's made up of C players? Are you trying to build up a company that is just like, yeah, you know, I'm good at what I do?

15:58Or do you want people that are great at what they do, are passionate about what they do, who are going to attract greatness? I mean, you see this in sports all the time. I mean, why is it trending in the NBA right now with all of the best players getting on the same team? Because they want to win a championship. Greatness attracts greatness. And that is so key, especially when you have a company, maybe where you're being incentivized by the success of the company. If you're getting stock options or equity or whatever that might look like, guess what? You want that company to be as amazing as possible and to have as much success as possible, which means the employees have to be the best they possibly can be.

16:34And let's be honest, who wants to surround ourselves with just average people? I mean, you know, I'm going to end this interview today the way I end every single interview with that Jim Rohn quote, if you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, people know that. They believe it. Surround yourself with the right people every single day. Now, Ryan, give us the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that you shared and talked about here today. And then also give us any way that we can connect with you, your company, any call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye.

17:06When you grow out in business, it's not sexy just to have a ton of people that work for you. What's truly sexy is to have a fully purpose-based business with complete alignment in your organization. That is fire. That's what's going to get you to sleep at night. And that's going to motivate you anytime you hit the next roadblock. Fire Nation, true words. Ryan, how do we connect with Viva HR, learn more about you, any call to action you have? Yeah, check out VivaHR.com. But more importantly, I'd love to connect with you on Instagram or Twitter. Ryan Naylor you can search for me in there and would love to connect I love to hear stories of entrepreneurs on how they're using company culture to really grow their business fire nation as I mentioned you're the average of those five people you spend the most time with you've been hanging out with Rye and JLD today so keep up that heat head over to eofire.com type Ryan in the search bar his show notes page will pop up with everything we've talked about here today best show notes in the biz.

18:08And of course, check out VivaHR.com and follow Ryan on social. That's what he does. He delivers value and loves to connect with people like you, Fire Nation. Ryan, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, today's value bomb content was brought to you by Ryan and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big, huge goals, which is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in just 100 days. And we're talking step by step.

18:44So visit thefreedomjournal.com. Use promo code podcast for a$15 discount. And thank you for listening to my podcast. And I will catch you there or on the flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan lands is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

19:21Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.

19:30Thank you.