Ray Blakney is the CEO and co-founder of Live Lingua, a renowned online language school. Live Lingua offers a unique and immersive approach to mastering a new language, as it pairs users who want to learn Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and more with their own hand-picked, certified, native-speaking tutor for online teaching sessions. Ray regularly educates others on the do's and don'ts for a successful digital transformation, how to better manage a remote company, tips to launch a successful online business, and more. Ray has an incredible story of how successful digital transformation helped his business survive and thrive during the Mexican swine flu pandemic of 2009 and the coronavirus crisis. Ray and his wife launched Live Lingua in 2009 in Mexico out of complete necessity, because the Mexican swine flu crisis dealt a major blow to their previous brick-and-mortar language immersion school in Mexico. Overnight, all flights to Mexico were closed for fear of a pandemic (what happened during the COVID-19 crisis), so they had to innovate in order to support themselves and their staff. It was then that they tried Skype Spanish lessons with their past students. It was so successful that they decided to launch it as a separate service on its own page — LiveLingua.com. Now, over a decade later, Live Lingua has been continuously growing and dominating the online language learning scene. Ray is also the CEO and founder of Podcast Hawk (a SaaS product that helps people get booked on podcasts). An award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur, speaker, and podcaster, Ray also builds and helps others build 6- and 7-figure businesses on a bootstrap budget using SEO. Ray has also traveled to almost 50 countries and regularly shares expert travel advice with podcasts.
