Success is not something that pops up overnight. Countless hours of consistency, hard work, and sacrifice are just the baseline requirements to find success in today’s business world. To ensure you find massive success, you need to have a genuine interest and care for your clients. Darryl Drake has had the work ethic all of his life, as he has been managing businesses since youth. But the rare ability to connect with clients he possesses is what allows him to bring massive value to people and is what has enabled him to become a force in the industry at just 30 years old.
A Southern California native, Darryl has always had a passion for helping fellow entrepreneurs. But, his idea of helping his peers differs from the normal business mentality, where people are only “helping” people to sell them a service. Drake takes it upon himself to not only assist his peers professionally, sometimes even for free via Instagram or in-person workshops, but to connect with them on a personal level. He finds sharing your story to be important, as someone going through the same thing can relate to you and find inspiration to help themselves and get back on track. Doing this results in zero financial gain, but it shows Darryl’s genuine care for his peers and gives him the credibility and trust to bring in clients by the masses.
His ability to care and connect with his clients has allowed him to scale a sales company from the ground at 18 years old to $40M+ in sales and expansion into 15 countries by 29 years old. While his ventures have been successful in the long run, the journey to that point was far from easy. Similar to any other entrepreneur working to launch a company off of the ground, Darryl faced his fair share of failure and disappointment. Rather than taking the losses to heart and folding on the company, he took them in stride and treated them as lessons. He says himself that failures are inevitable, but are not permanent. What you do as a result of failing is what truly matters in the long term. Years later, as a result of learning from his failures, Darryl is in a fantastic position. He gets to live out his passion of helping others every day as a president of a company.
Drake is currently the president of SAP, a personal and business development company. The company’s mission is to help their clients rebuild personal and business credit by educating them on how credit works. To go along with their credit service, SAP also mentors clients on how to obtain funding for personal and business needs. The mission of the company lines up with Darryl’s personal mission, helping his peers out of genuine care for their well-being rather than solely for personal gain.
Providing credit education to clients not only allows them to repair their credit, it allows them to maintain a strong score for the rest of their lives. Since credit scores have such strong implications in today’s society, building good credit can be a key to living out your dreams, and for Darryl to be able to empower his clients to live out their dreams as a result of his service is the biggest reward of entrepreneurship, he says.
As rewarding as Drake’s career has been for the past decade, he still hasn’t found fulfillment. He made the tough decision to step away from his 10 year career in sales and truly wants to take complete ownership of his career moving forward. He embodies the idea that no one is in control of your career except for you, and Darryl will simply never settle for anything less than exceptional for his professional career.
