[Interview series Episode 4] Guest: Ray Blakney - Interview topic “How do you make 2021 count for the business you love?”

Life Origami Podcast with Alen Leit

Our fourth episode in the series of interview with Entrepreneurs that are building a business they love.

Tonight's guest is Ray Blakney | Award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur | Bootstrapped multiple 6 and 7-figure online businesses | International Speaker | Podcaster | Semi-professional sword fighter

He and his businesses have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Boston Globe and other top publications. Ray has also been a speaker at multiple conferences around the world.

--- Below you can find a time breakdown of the topics we touched in the interview:

00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:51 - Ray's background 00:02:54 - Ray, are you a night person or a morning person? 00:05:07 - Ray, how do you manage to upkeep your regime? 00:06:57 - Talking about passion 00:09:17 - Process as a passion 00:13:17 - What businesses is Ray building 00:14:53 - How long does it take to build a sustainable business? 00:17:07 - Importance of self-awareness and self-development for business success 00:18:51 - Optimizing reading process. Reading vs listening books 00:19:58 - Side hustles and new businesses in the making 00:27:01 - Reinvesting profits. Business pocket vs personal pocket. 00:29:04 - Making investments from business profits 00:32:34 - Ray, how do you manage to balance business, family, self-care and development? 00:36:15 - Ray's daily routine and productive day structure + Decision making process 00:40:41 - An important question to ask yourself in prioritizing 00:42:33 - Personal Manifesto, what is it, it's value and how it works + Itamar Marani | business - mindset coach 00:48:12 - Life planning, vision and Ideal life scenario 00:51:23 - What systems help you to stay productive besides journaling? 00:52:26 - Systems and tools for business productivity 00:54:51 - Limiting your business with you time + What do you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for business growth? 00:57:29 - For solopreneurs, what is the main daily activity they should focus on? 01:00:27 - Tips on outsourcing from Ray 01:04:58 - How do you find freelancers? 01:07:00 - What should be the first hire for businesses? 01:09:47 - Ideas on Search engine optimization 01:11:33 - What tools or systems helped you with building self-awareness? 01:15:13 - Changes in self-perception with growth of income 01:18:22 - Ray, what actually influenced your growth of income? 01:20:23 - Ray shares additional self-care ideas 01:22:37 - The surrounding and its influence on success 01:24:54 - Masterminds and what do you believe makes them work? 01:27:33 - How to build trust in a mastermind? 01:29:14 - Getting in to masterminds 01:31:23 - Using podcasts to build a community 01:32:20 - Advice from Ray on what to do right now, to make the most of 2021 in your business 01:33:15 - Advice for 6 figure + business owners

--- Some of his businesses include Live Lingua (one of the top online language schools) - https://www.livelingua.com/ Twiducate (a social network for schools with over 200k registered users and Podcast Hawk (a SAAS product that helps you get booked on podcasts on auto-pilot). - https://podcasthawk.com/ He is also host of one of the top language learning podcasts on iTunes Learn Spanish with Live Lingua releasing a new episode daily.

--- Life Origami Podcast with Alen Leit, is a talk show, where we take a look at business as a tool for self-realization. We will invite to the microphone Entrepreneurs who are building a business they love and will cover topics from self-development and self-awareness to productivity and business strategies.

--- Support the podcast by becoming an official Patron and join our closed Patron Facebook group: https://www.patreon.com/lifeorigamipodcast

--- More information about what I do you can find below: * www.alenleit.com * https://www.facebook.com/alenleit/ * https://www.instagram.com/alenleit/