Creating Opportunity During Uncertainty with Ryan Estis
In Season One of 12 Geniuses, keynote speaker Ryan Estis joined the show to discuss the challenges he faced leaving a high-paying corporate job during a recession to create his own business. During that conversation, Ryan talked about how 2019 was poised to be the most successful year of his business. The year after that, the pandemic hit, and in-person events were abruptly canceled, leaving Ryan with a new set of challenges. This week, Ryan and Don meet once again to discuss how he reinvented himself and has emerged more relevant than ever before. Listen in to hear about the ways that Ryan pivoted his business to include virtual keynotes and workshops, as well as how the pandemic changed his outlook on life and his relationships with loved ones.
Ryan Estis has spent over a decade helping business leaders and other clients actualize their potential. He is passionate about challenging leaders to become the most effective versions of themselves. In addition to delivering powerful keynotes during in-person and virtual events, Ryan has developed a workshop series and maintains an active blog and newsletter to offer advice on how to take on the difficulties of the week ahead.
Resources From This Episode
Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn
Explore Ryan’s work on his website
Connect with Ryan on Facebook
Follow Ryan on Twitter
Connect with Ryan on Instagram
Sign up for Ryan’s newsletter
Take Ryan’s Resilient Leadership Workshop
Connect with Don on LinkedIn
Follow Don on Twitter
Transcript
Don MacPherson:
Hi, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. My friend, Ryan Estis, and I first met just as he was starting his business during a recession 12 years ago. In Season One of 12 Geniuses, Ryan and I talk about the challenges he faced leaving a high-paying corporate job to go out on his own. Since then, he has achieved incredible success. But when the pandemic hit in early 2020, it was obvious he was in for a new set of challenges. Ryan and I discuss how he once again reinvented himself and has emerged more relevant than ever.
This episode of 12 Geniuses is sponsored by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful and emotionally intelligent leadership. Ryan, welcome back to 12 Geniuses.
Ryan Estis:
It's great to be back, Don. Congratulations on the success of the show.
Don MacPherson:
It's been about three years since we first recorded in your apartment in Minneapolis. Fill us in on what's happened over the last three years.
Ryan Estis:
What hasn't happened, right? A lot has changed. Three years ago, things were rolling along pretty good. And then obviously the world changed Q1 2020. 2019, we were coming off the best year since the inception of the company, with 10 straight years of top-line growth, and 2019 was a phenomenal year. We expected that trajectory to continue. And then obviously a lot of events got shut down in March 2020, so things changed quite dramatically.
Don MacPherson:
The first time we talked, we talked about your entrepreneurial journey, and we talked about fear, and that being one of the emotions that you had when you were starting out. Can you describe how the events of 2020 were different? I'm assuming there was some fear as you saw live events being canceled and your business going from just on-fire rocket ship to maybe nothing.
Ryan Estis:
Without question. A lot of uncertainty and fear and what was this, how long was this going to last? And actually, ironically, March 11 was my last live event coming into the pandemic. March 13 was my birthday and we spent a little time together that night. I woke up the next day and really the next month, the next four to six weeks were the unraveling of an 80-event live speaking calendar. It was discussions about postponement, reschedules, cancellations, deposits. None of it was positive. Obviously nothing new was…
That kind of shut down any business development or potential opportunities. That was a really, really difficult period. There's no way to kind of prepare for that type of disruption. I would have never predicted in my lifetime it would be a global health crisis where human beings aren't allowed to congregate. Basically, effectively, the government shut down the live event industry, right? The first six weeks, there was a ton of fear. I mean, I spent a lot of time, “why is this happening to me? I can't believe I've worked so hard and now it's all being taken.”
Probably in May, I started to move from why is this happening to me to, OK, it is happening, accepting the reality of the situation. And then I asked a much better question, “given that I'm here, what can I create? What's the opportunity inside this challenge, and how can we do something different?" I felt very strongly that our clients, the companies we'd work with, still needed a level of expertise and guidance and support and insight and perspective that I could offer. It was just going to have to be different.
We started working on “what would the ‘different’ look like?” That sparked a little bit of energy and creativity. Then I also decided not to give into the fear. I thought, and I think a lot of reasonable people felt, like the pandemic would last for a period of time. It's lasted longer than I ever thought it would. However, I decided as we moved into the summer that I was also going to embrace the opportunity. Inside the lifestyle adjustment of 80 live events means well over a hundred nights in hotels, and now I'm off the road for the first time in a decade and I'm home.
I can have a schedule and I can see friends on Tuesday night. I can buy a boat and learn how to wake surf and just have a different kind of rhythm to my life. I think there were benefits from both of those things.
Don MacPherson:
You said you saw a way out starting in May, and you said the clients are still going to need what you do, what you deliver, but how has what you deliver changed, and how did you figure your way out of that?
Ryan Estis:
A few ways. I started to have conversations with clients, with people that I respected, with people in my network about what they were seeing and experiencing. And through those conversations, I also felt like there was an opportunity to create. I lived and worked through the last significant crisis, the economic crisis, kind of the crash in 2008 and 2009, and it was actually the time that I started my business. I saw inside the context of a large organization where I was working, a Fortune 500 organization, a lot of missteps from my perspective.
I had some real insight as a former executive in that environment about what to do and not to do. And then obviously the segue out and starting your own business in 2009, that provided a whole other information and experience that I could draw upon. My idea through this was, get informed of what are people dealing with, and then create around it. It was probably the most creative period of my career. I mean, we developed two new keynotes, a new half-day workshop, an entire new series with new contents.
Right into this, I started to make things that I thought would either be relevant, or I did it in partnership with a client who was asking for the information. We had a beta client who kind of sponsored a lot of the creation and paid for it, which was really wonderful, and that obviously became products that we could bring to market in other ways. The other thing that happened was the opportunities to deliver our work product virtually evolved quickly.
This year, here we are in 2021, a year later, and we're going to deliver the same volume of work we did in 2019, which was the record year in our business. We're just doing it differently. Most of it's virtual.
Don MacPherson:
And you get to stay home.
Ryan Estis:
And I get to stay home. So yeah, I've made some big investments into my own health and wellness, and I'm on more of a consistent routine. I'm sleeping in my own bed and sleeping better. I'm healthier, and I've enjoyed some of the free time that otherwise I just wouldn't have if I was traveling at the pace I was previously.
Don MacPherson:
And that's what I wanted to get into is, how has your life, your values, the way you view your identity changed over the last 15 months?
Ryan Estis:
I think it's changed significantly. In the beginning, I would say I had an identity crisis, and I went through a period of time of examining “who am I if I'm not the guy that's on 80 stages” and what would it be like to just be Ryan? At first, it was overwhelming to kind of confront that reality that I'm not a keynote speaker anymore and I don't have this kind of exciting job of jumping onto these stages in front of thousands of people. I'm just a guy with a laptop that's trying to figure something on my kitchen table.
And that was really hard at first. And then I actually in an odd way started to enjoy it. I enjoyed the space and the freedom to create again. That when you're working at that pace, you just don't have ... I mean, it's back-to-back calls and meetings and flights. You just don't have the space or the bandwidth. So that part was great. The other part that was great was just the time. I got in a regular exercise and workout routine. I hired a trainer. It was summertime in Minnesota, and so I bought a boat. I learned how to wake surf.
I enjoyed time in nature. I learned how to sleep. That was great. I was sleeping seven or eight hours a night on a regular consistent schedule. Just time with friends and people I care about. I wasn't somebody that was able to go to dinner with a friend on a Wednesday night just because of the way my work was being delivered. It did shift my perspective. I think I got a little separation between Ryan the keynote speaker and Ryan the person. And that's a very, very valuable thing.
I identified probably with that less. That's my work, and I love what I do and that makes me fortunate, but it's not who I am.
Don MacPherson:
You're a person who gets to fly wherever you want and have dinners and do exciting things very often. That was cut off because we had to socially distance. Bars and restaurants were closed. People weren't flying, or that was pretty limited. Do you have a newfound appreciation for being able to do some of these things like go to Tulum, Mexico, or have an incredible dinner with friends or with your mom? I know you go to see her in Cleveland on occasion.
Ryan Estis:
Yeah, I do. I mean, I was at a point where I took it for granted. It was just the way I was living, and I was living that way for so long. But a trip to Mexico or a dinner in Miami, it was just another week. When all of that is taken away, you have an opportunity to step back and reevaluate. There were habits and behaviors that I might not want to return to.
I was running pretty hard on the treadmill at 12 for a long time, but there were also moments of joy that maybe I was just moving through because it was the next thing I didn't savor and appreciate it the same way that I do right now. My relationship with time changed, and I realized, who knows how many more of those dinners you're going to get? When you have an opportunity to hit pause and celebrate someone's birthday, or sit across from your mom for three hours with a glass of wine, savor that. Be present to it.
Enjoy and appreciate it, and look forward to it and plan for it. I wanted to mark these things, and I wanted to create memories and make sure that I connect with the people that I love. And I have things on the calendar that I'm really looking forward to. Those are real priorities now, and they're treated with a sense of urgency that maybe I lacked previously.
Don MacPherson:
Is there anything that you regret over the past 15 months?
Ryan Estis:
I would say that if there's a regret, and it's not a huge one, but I certainly see looking back now that there was probably some complacency because my business was so good. I didn't push myself, prioritize, maybe diversification or take advantage of other kinds of opportunities. I didn't have to, right? The business was good the way it was, but there was also some vulnerabilities in the way I was operating that business. Our primary revenue stream was from live speaking and live events.
And beyond the pandemic, there's vulnerabilities in that business in any event. I think if there was a regret, maybe not thinking through that with a little more discipline and detail as it was expanding was probably a missed opportunity, but I understand why I did it, and I'm OK with that because there's still plenty of time and I'm doing it now.
Don MacPherson:
What's the most important lesson you've learned over the last 15 months?
Ryan Estis:
I think life is fragile. Time is finite. And if there's something that's in your heart ... Life is people. Life is relationships. At the end of our life, I think when you kind of look back and reflect on the journey, the parts that bring you the most joy, meaning and fulfillment or the impact you've had on people, the experiences you shared with the people you love and care about, that's life. And it's easy to get sucked into other things. Our culture reinforces and validates, right, this idea of success.
But success without meaning and fulfillment and love, joy and peace in your heart, it's kind of empty. Balancing those things has become a new priority for me. That doesn't mean that as live events are starting to come back that I'm not really intense on putting dates on my calendar. I am, because I love the work and I look forward to getting back out there. But making sure that it's balanced, consistent with my priorities and values, is really going to be important going forward.
I don't want to let the next 10 years vanish and look back and say, "I missed it, or I got back on that treadmill at 12 and missed those moments to create those memories that really mattered."
Don MacPherson:
Thanks for spending some time again with us, and thank you again for being a genius.
Ryan Estis:
It's my pleasure.
Don MacPherson:
Thanks for listening to 12 Geniuses. During next week's interview, we're going to check in with Season One guest Jim Geckler. Jim is CEO of Harmony Foundation, the drug and alcohol recovery center in Estes Park, Colo. Jim will explain how the pandemic has exacerbated drug and alcohol use. He will also help us understand how to identify the signs that one of our friends, family members or co-workers needs help with their drug or alcohol use. That episode will be released Aug. 10, 2021. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.