Founders Inspiring Founders: Dain Walker

"Becoming a founder is like driving down a dirt highway at midnight with one flickering headlight, it’s terrifying, if you keep driving, you can make the whole journey."

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Dain Walker is the Founder & CEO of Rivyl, a content creator, and a world-renowned brand strategist.

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What inspired you to embark on the entrepreneurship journey and become a founder?

I always gravitated toward creating my own income. When I was 9, I would wash neighbours' cars and clean their yards for cash. When I was 16, I would take two bags to school, one for my books and the second full of candy and soda, and I would sell to my classmates since the cafeteria banned sugar from my school. In my early 20s, I successfully recruited 2600 people for my MLM business and found a passion for developing leaders and creating my own community. So, beginning my creative agency was a natural evolution into building my established business.

Reflecting on your journey, what has been the biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?

The necessity for personal development was one of the biggest obstacles I had to overcome in order to expand my company. I needed to improve my ability to set up frameworks that my team could operate inside. It wasn't easy to grow from being a lone freelancer to 30 employees in just 4 years; my team and I had to be constantly focused on creating reliable, efficient procedures. As crucial was the duty of making certain that my organisation never lost sight of its basic principles. The work needed to keep up a solid culture inside a team increases as it gets bigger. I overcame these challenges by consulting with professionals who had previously managed a creative business; this choice gave me the ability to lead my more more skillfully and effectively.

Could you share one or two key pieces of advice you’d give to aspiring entrepreneurs aiming to become successful founders?

At the end of the day, your team will go home and do one of two things:

1) Complain about your company, 

2) Rave about how great your company is.

To be a successful founder means you must create an accountable, adaptable, and capable team culture so your team can take massive action without you meddling with everything. If you micro-manage your team, they will depend on you for everything, choking your growth. If you develop a strong culture of independence, your team will begin to operate autonomously. This is the key to Rivyl’s success.

In your opinion, what makes a founder a successful founder?

A founder’s success is directly linked to the strength of their team. That’s why it’s important to have people close to you that you can trust. People that can manage teams and drive success in a collaborative and mutually beneficial way. A healthy business relies on having an honest, skilled team that genuinely cares about the goals and mission of the company. As a founder, you need to have a vision that your team can get behind and be inspired by to drive everything forward. Founders have to be extremely aware of how they spend their time so they can optimize and maximize their presence for the benefit of their team. The most successful founders spend the majority of their time in revenue-generating endeavours, allowing them to inspire and lead their teams without being caught up in areas that can be better handled by their trusted managers.