Entrepreneurship vs. corporate “security”: The Ryan Levesque Story

Many people would dream of having a job, where they can live luxuriously in a foreign country and afford a chauffeur and domestic staff. It is a life that many people would wish for and never think of leaving behind.

Meet Ryan Levesque, who had the sort of life others dream of when working for AIG, a multinational insurance company in Shanghai, while he studied direct response marketing on the weekends. He began studying after he realized that he was unsatisfied with his ‘dream job’ and he became aware of the different possibilities that were out there after reading books, such as ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ by Tim Ferriss.

The changes in his perspective made Ryan eventually reach out to friends he had in the US who were making money through online businesses. He, and his wife Tylene, began their own online business that taught others how to make a specific type of jewelry, from which they made a few thousand dollars a month.

After the financial crisis in 2008, he decided to leave the security that a corporate job could offer and pursue what would be a fulfilling career.

Ryan resigned from AIG, which was going bankrupt, and started to work on the online jewelry business full time. The business was bringing in little money after the financial crisis and they lived on a 500 dollar a month stipend from his wife.

A year later, Tylene was hired as a museum curator in Brownsville, Texas, so they moved back to the US, where they lived very modestly and did everything from selling books to stuffing envelopes, all the while reinvesting what money they made from online sales back into their online business. However, this time is not remembered by Ryan as a particularly difficult time of struggle as he finds living ‘lean’ a good way to live, and they did not live that way long.

Soon enough, they took over other small online business and turning them into successful revenue makers by applying direct marketing expertise. They built a especially successful online gardening business and moved closer to Austin in 2009. Ryan was then approached by other business owners to implement his expertise into their businesses. From there, the sky was the limit.

Currently, Ryan and Tylene run a successful marketing agency and a coaching program for businesses, as well as a book publishing company. Ryan has written about his method and how he rose to success in a book titled, ‘Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy…Create a Mass of Raving Fans…and Take Any Business to the Next Level.’

Even though their businesses now end the year having earned millions of dollars, the family have not returned to a luxurious lifestyle but spend money on making their life a little easier and more enjoyable on their time off. Ryan believes in working hard to be lazy, so he can enjoy the the luxury of deciding what they want or do not want to do.

Ryan is now best known as the creator of RocketMemory, SurveyFunnel and the ASK Method. He is the author of three books and 34 information and software products and has generated 37 million dollars worth of revenue for his private clients since 2008.

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