People
‘I haven’t failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.’
Thomas Edison
Ryan’s first entrepreneurial venture was starting a Retail Security labour force firm in 1997 at the age of 23. After three years he was servicing most major retailers in Australia, including the Coles Myer Group and Woolworths Limited.
In 2000, he sold to Multi-national. Throughout that period, Ryan was recognised in 2000 and 2001 as a finalist in the National Australia Day Young Achiever of the Year Awards and profiled regularly in the media
Since then, Ryan has founded and grown several businesses including an Education business that he co-founded in 1998 that was later sold to a publicly listed company in late 2003 and in 2004 co-founded the NinetyDays Agency that specialised in advising high growth companies including Deloitte in Australia where he assumed an ‘Entrepreneur in Residence’ role.
Ryan again focussed on education and founded Franklyn Scholar in early 2008 and within 3 years became Australia’s Largest private VET Workplace Education with more than 20,000 participants commencing training per year and employing more than 300 people across all capital cities. Franklyn Scholar was sold to Kaplan (part of the Washington Post) in May 2011.
In 2010, Ryan became the Ernst & Young ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ in the Southern Region (services category) and went on to compete as a national finalist.
Ryan was accepted into the Entrepreneurial Masters Program at MIT in Boston in 2007 where he recently finished a three year program and completed a similar program at Stanford University in California in June 2010.
Ryan is the past President for the Entrepreneurs Organisation (EO) in Melbourne and is currently a member of (YPO) Young Presidents Organisation.
Ryan now has launched Crosby & Prince Ventures, a boutique investment fund.