Who Am I?
A retired dog-trainer, entrepreneur, corporate salesman, non-profit founder, vlogger, podcast host, triathlete - goofball?
I’m Ryan Brooks, an adventurous guy who has a lust for living life. Everything I do boils down to three things; Learning, Solving problems, and having fun.
Because of the ever-growing list of things I’ve done and am interested in, I don’t like titles. Feel free to call me whatever you’d like, but I’ll always answer to Ryan ;)
Want to know more?
-Just Keep Scrolling or check out my Content-
I’m from the land of mountain bikes, opportunity, nature, art, food and progress: NorthWest Arkansas
You should check it out… or we could just keep it a secret
I guess you could say I’ve always been a weird Kid. I was an only child until I was around 10 years old and was never afraid to do my own thing, even if it meant sticking out or seeming a little bit weird.
I had a privileged and blessed upbringing that I was lucky to experience. A mission of mine is to help people around the world experience some of the blessings and gifts I received during childhood.
My life was pretty standard through highschool. I didn’t really do anything out of the ordinary (except my tiny drink-running business) until college.
I went to the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business where I discovered my love for business and entrepreneurship.
My first dive into running a business was when I was the CEO figure for the 100% student-run business: Forever-Red. I led a team of 15 students, created new products, sold hundreds of care-packages to the parents of incoming students, dealt with Chinese manufacturing, pitched and landed items in retail locations across NWA and presented to the infamous Walton College Board of Directors. I was happy to help lead our business to a breakout year with $80K revenue.
Me and the Forever-Red management team presenting our new Hog Hologram product to the board of directors
Going into my Junior year of college, I was waiting for my big business idea… but it never came. I did well in classes, but my mind was set on doing more.
The first step, in my case, was the purchase of my first home.
Because of the absurdly affordable cost of living in NWA, financial help from my deceased grand-papi, plus the advice, support, and love of my family, friends and advisors, I was able to buy a 3 bedroom house at the age of 20 and begin renting out the bedrooms to two roommates.
I had become a 20 year old landlord and had finally caught my first glimpse at how I could live life differently.
And this…. is where dogs come into play. woof
Growing up with split households who loved golden retrievers and border collies, I was constantly surrounded by up to 7 fur-babies at a time! My step-mom was involved with Border-Collie rescue, so we took in around 25 troubled Border-Collie’s, rehabilitated them and found them good homes as I was growing up. I never really new how good I was with dogs, until my senior year of college when I watched a friends puppy Leo for a week. I treated Leo like I would my own pup; walks, runs, fetch, playing & training. After that week, my friend wanted to pay me for not just watching Leo, but for how well trained Leo had become.
After watching Leo a few more times and then watching a few more college students dogs, I began to build what is known today as Pawsitive-Pup Dog Training, my first official business.
I filed paperwork, built out accounting, built my first website, started building social media presence, studied dog-training and finally, began training dogs and working with clients!
Pawsitive-Pup was a success, but even-though I loved working with dogs and people, I could tell I didn’t want to do it for life.
After 6 months of steady training and building, I felt like I learned most of the lessons from my small-business and had started really filling up my calendar. I was enjoying the business, but my heart was being pulled in another direction. I took a job at Field Agent (where I was working part time and am working now) and began to dream up more and more business ideas with aspirations to change the world. As my focus shifted, my time for dog-training waned, and I started sending clients to another great local dog-trainer. I still keep all the lessons with me and do an occasional session, but Pawsitive-Pup, had become a thing of the past.
Not everything I’ve done has gone well. Let me highlight two projects that arrived at a “no-go” decision.
It was during my building of the dog-training business, I had taken a class on social entrepreneurship and a group of friends and I wanted to create a business that addressed food-insecurity in NWA. We came up with the idea of placing Hydroponic Freight Farms throughout the community at homeless centers, schools, food pantries etc.. to act both as hubs for food distribution and gardens for growing healthy food options. After months of work, we felt our idea was amazing, and had three potential first clients, Thaden school, Spectrum Living solutions and Core Brewing company. Alas, our team wasn’t ready to commit to the prospect of going all-in to raise funding and make this dream a reality. But the lessons learned, will never leave me.
Another project happened right after graduation. I was accepted into the National Science Foundations Innovation-corps program for Arkansas and was placed onto a 3-person team. We wanted to address the opioid epidemic. We developed our idea about creating diagnostic tools to help Doctors, Nurses, Physicians and pharmacists better understand someone’s proclivity to opioid addiction using deep data-analytics and AI. We interviewed doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physicians, professors and the community to better understand the problem and what we could do about it.
At the end of the I-Corps program, we arrived at a “no-go” decision. Our approach to using a data-tool, we deemed, would have too little effect and would be too difficult to sell to our target market. The mix of team-members were much more academic oriented than business so we felt we had contributed great research, but the business wasn’t the right step forward.
These few decisions to not move forward and focus around creating business that helps the community led me to one of my current ventures: Corners of the Field.
Corners of the Field is a non-profit I’m currently working on where we aim to connect those experiencing homelessness with working “gigs” throughout NWA. We found that plenty of places like churches, event centers, public spaces have a need for work to be done that falls between the cracks of full-time positions. We want to build a system that can hire people who are homeless to complete these payed tasks on-demand throughout the community so we can provide meaningful work and pay for those who need it most while completing tasks that provide real value for the clients we serve.
We have had several amazing tests and have provided a couple thousand dollars of work and pay to people experiencing homelessness.
The future of Corners of the Field is uncertain as we face a current pause due to Covid-19. Stay tuned for future updates!
Finally, we are up to speed on my current projects. Through the learnings, trials, errors, successes and failures, I have found myself here today - working on something new.
I have continued to create new business ideas, and have continued to research and learn about life while trying to have as much fun as possible. I have realized that I may never have the discipline to fully commit to one project and stick with it for years & years, but one thing I can commit to, is myself.
Thats why I have made this content, made this website, started the podcast, started a YouTube channel and began training for a Triathlon - To fully explore what makes Ryan, well.. Ryan. I want to continue to learn, foster and share ideas, interact with more people, teach about what I’ve learned and create a lifestyle that I am excited to wake up and live everyday.
If you read this far, I thank you for taking the time getting to know me. If you want to speak to me about anything, whether thats questions about my life, questions about business or just a conversation - go fill out a contact form and I’ll reach out to you personally.
