We stumbled upon a tech entrepreneur going from 0 to 1 with a new business model in China that couldn’t be done until now. Today we sit down with Richart Ruddie who’s creativity and vision is setting his ORM firm up for an exciting future opening up a new market that doesn’t currently exist.
You Own multiple businesses and have featured in many popular media, could you tell us more about this?
I prefer to stay out of the spotlight and try to live a very modest life but have been approached through the years by the biggest publications wanting to cover either myself or one of my ventures. One story I find interesting is that the Wall Street Journal was doing a piece on reputation management and took an overly negative tone to both the industry as well to my “claim” that I could remove any negative Yelp search result from Google. The journalist Angus Loten years later stuck his head in the sand and acknowledged that I was right with my claim when the media picked up on my abilities and social engineering skills that had many praising me as a genius and clamoring to work with me to help fix their online issues. I obsess over my clients success and take my success on theirs. Similar to Jeff Bezos model at Amazon and it has thus translated to success for the business. When your clients know you will go above and beyond for them they don’t have to think about going elsewhere.
You are a founding partner of Class Updates, please tell us more about this application?
I find myself funding, mentoring, and starting a lot of different ventures (see Protos Eyewear the 1st consumer grade 3D printed eyewear company) and am just as proud of my failures as I am my successes. Class Updates is a great tool for the education world that helps connects students and teachers with instant updates through push notifications. We have thousands of schools and users giving us positive feedback on how we’re helping to improve the education field through our application and look forward to our continuous growth as more and more users sign up daily.
What is your newest Reputation Management Project and what problems are you solving?
So this is actually a Chinese venture I’m embarking on and am investing my own money to bring social credit monitroing and improvement tools to the mainland. I’ve been assembling a team to help those on the Mainland to improve the way they are seen in Baidu and other online searches as well as helping them to track how they are being viewed and rated. It’s similar to a credit monitoring service here but a more evasive and intesive version over there. At the end of the day our goal is to help our clients to be better every day citizens.
Why are you the best, What major features or services make you unique?
I don’t like to rate and compete. I find it best to put my head down work hard and care about my clients successes and that has proven to be a winning formula.
Could you give us a walkthrough of how this are done at Reputation Management, including pricing?
Last night I had a client from 3.5 years ago follow up asking for more work as a new problem has arised. It was at 1:00 AM and he got a response and his initial issue resolved within 12 hours. Find that level of service from another player in the industry.
Who are your major clients, do you have any success stories to share with us?
While I would love to be able to share our many successes our clients protection is our top priority and as these nut job free speech advocates have shown they will stop at nothing short to try and extort and hurt good epeople who have been wrongly defamed online so that information is not shared.
Do you have any opportunities for partners and investors at Reputation Management?
We are launching a billion dollar business in China and are in talks with potential investors but as of now I’m personally funding millions of the development costs as I believe strongly in the business and prefer to hold as much equity as possible.
Could you tell us about your team and customer support?
We have a team built out in Salt Lake City, Utah that are some of the most hard working, honest, and diligent team members one could ask for. We’re also working on building out our China team and have some employees who are CBC (Canadian Born Chinese) from Vancouver, Canada but travel back and forth to the Mainland and are helping with the build out of our new venture there.
Any Books that you recommend and what are you reading now?
How to win Friends and Influence People is one of my favorite books that I recommend to everyone to read.
I see you’re an avid traveler any international travel plans coming up?
I’ve been to over 30 countries and always look to find new cities and places that I haven’t been to before. Last year I got to see Riga, Latvia which is where my grandmother was born and went to see the Windmill that my grandfather was named after (Miller) as well as small towns in Lithuania and Belarus that our ancestors used to occupy. This year I’m looking forward to visiting Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and China.
Do you have more information for our readers?
Live life to the fullest and follow your efforts. People will want to pay you for what you’re good at and that is determined by following what you excel at. Whether it’s being a DJ, Chef, Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur, or whatever it is that you enjoy and are good at doing things will fall in place for you. You don’t have to go to Stanford or Harvard to be successful while those networks will go a long way it’s the effort and execution that you put in that will determine your success and there is no success without happiness in your life.
Follow Richard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichartRuddie
Connect on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richartruddiestanford/
