Our story
Our Founder, Richard Gaustad, started to build Ranking Trainer in 2017 after numerous Affiliates, colleagues, contractors and friends urged him to begin teaching what he knows so other can benefit too.
After 2 years of development, we started actively promoting Membership sales in early 2020 and continue to add new courses, lessons, income platforms and build our community.
Mission Statement
First is to provide the finest SEO and Website Design services anywhere, and to do it at reasonable prices so even the smallest companies can affort the best.
Second, is to become the leading e-learning source for people seeking a Do-It-Yourself method to perform theswe services for themselves,.

Parent Company
Ranking Trainer is a division of Mr. Gaustad’s telecom services, which he started in March 2006. This International telecom service, at the time of this writing (Winter 2020) processes millions of calls daily and reaches more than 220 countries.
B2B Servivces
Ranking Trainer provides Web Design and SEO services for local, national and international Clients. We’ve been doing this for many years and our clients have had great success! Contact us at any time for a fee quote on your project.
B2C Services
B2C means “Bsiness-to-Consumer.” We provide 2 different services for consumers: Our Membership training platform and Voifone UCS (“Unified Communication System”). Voifone UCS is very similar to WhatsApp, except it has more VoIP features and also pays its users for sharing the app with others who also use it. Incomes can be significant. (See disclaimer in footer below.)
Online Income Platforms
Ranking Trainer is unique because we have integrated training with our Affiliate program so users not only learn to build their OWN income-producing websites, but they can also sell Ranking Trainer memberships and all Voifone services because all Members are also registered as Affiliates. Our Affiliate program is capable of providing incomes ranging from part time to professional level incomes. (See disclaimer in footer.)
Your Dream. Our Mission.
We Believe Everyone should build an online income
We train our Members to be financially self-sufficient with WordPress and SEO training, YouTube marketing, mobile marketing and our own proprietary Affiliate and Voifone UCS income platforms.
Regardless of age, education, economic status, religion or country of origin, we help our members achieve their financial dreams and goals.
My Personal Business Story
By Richard Gaustad
I know you likely have no idea who I am so I wanted to start by giving you more context about my business history and experience.
I know this seems like a bit of a long message, but it’ll only take about 5 minutes to read the whole thing. I promise it’s worth your time as I share some of my business and personal experience that got me to where I’m at today.
You’re going to learn about my past successes – and failures – in business. I’ve been self-employed my entire adult life.
I bet you didn’t know I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Music. It’s true! Although I always loved playing music, I never wanted to be a high school music teacher or play the club circuit all my life.
The life of a full-time professional musician was not at all appealing to me. Very few are financially successful. The phrase “poor starving musician” was coined for a reason.
Sure I was pretty good back in the day (drums, guitar, and piano). But so were millions of other musicians. Very few can make a decent living in music despite having talent and skill.
So when I was 23, after earning money through my teens and early 20s as a musician, I started a small promotional ad company called Advertising Specialists.
After a couple of years, one of my promotions, a cash discount card, distributed 20,000 membership cards in a county with a 50,000 population. It was a great success!
Before long, that discount card was in use up and down the primary metro area in Utah, about a 150-mile long and 20-mile wide corridor with Salt Lake City at the center.
By the time I was 29, I had a tiger by the tail! The original service morphed into a full-fledged buying service (think “Mail-Order Costco”).
We had 2 warehouses, each one about 100,000 square feet in size, a main office with 25,000 square feet, a Sperry-Univac mainframe computer system, 435 employees, and our own fleet of semi-trucks.
We even had our own Cessna Citation corporate jet for traveling to and from sales and training sessions with our team and for other business meetings.
The year was 1982, before PCs and the Internet. We did about $2.5 million in monthly sales at the time. That’s $30 million a year. For perspective, $30 million in 1982 dollars is about $92.5 million in today’s dollars.
I was 29 years old at that time. That year, I bought one of the first PCs ever sold, at a time when very few Americans had a computer.
Yep. I had a genuine, Kaypro II personal computer, with TWO, 64K floppy drives. Depending on your age, you may not even know what a “floppy drive” was. Ha! (You can look it up – Google knows.)
I was hooked on all things PC from the time I bought that first PC – and I still am!
That same year, I sold the business – for way less than its value. I was young and inexperienced or I would have demanded more. But I was overly confident.
I thought I could start up another enterprise and make a fast success. After all, just look what I had already built. I thought I had some great ideas. How could I miss?
I was wrong. That money from the sale of the business disappeared in a hurry – without producing any profits. This was awful, especially for a guy in his first year of marriage.
My new wife and I moved from Utah to Arizona where her relatives let us live rent-free on a farm property until we got on our feet financially.
That was a humbling experience.
After about a year, I discovered my next big “thing”. I became a “Factor”. This is a business I learned about in my late 20s. It enabled me to build that first company from a $700 original investment to the monster I described above.
A Factor is one who buys accounts receivable. Companies that sell their goods and services on open credit terms, like “Net 30”, often have cash flow issues. They need their money NOW, but their customers often pay late.
If banks won’t provide a working capital line of credit, odds are a Factor will. So I raised cash from private investors and started a factoring business.
It provided stability and wealth. In fact, it was more profitable than the first company and grew to a larger size. So about two years after moving to Arizona, I had a business doing $1.5 million a month.
Out of my garage! I used to joke that I have the only house on the block generating more than a million a month in cash flow. Ha! (But it was true!)
This business ultimately did more cash flow and lasted much longer than the first one. Expenses were smaller and profits higher.
After about 12 years of operating that company, I was confident that I was “set for life” as they say. Little did I know disaster lurked right around the corner.
After 14 years in Arizona, I found myself broke again and moving my family back to Utah. There had been a dispute with the government. I lost the legal battle.
That cost me everything and then some.
The litigation and legal problems took about 13 years from start to finish. In the midst of those problems, I experienced divorce, homelessness, and a 2-year term in federal prison.
I had hit rock bottom.
But I never gave up hope and never quit trying to improve. When the legal issues settled down, I found myself sitting on top of my next major project – and it’s the one I’ve been running for the past 16 years.
In the early days of the PC revolution, I learned some coding. After all, software wasn’t readily available. We had to write our own. So I did.
And I also got in on the very first wave when the Internet was established.
My first website was published in 1996 and I was building websites in HTML before 2005. I switched to WordPress in 2010 and have been in this industry ever since.
My current company has developed commercial telecom apps and marketing apps. We’ve done website development and SEO. At one point, we even built and sold telecom systems.
Now, I focus on the major divisions of this company: Telecom, Web Design/SEO and E-Learning.
We’re currently on track to outperform my biggest success of the past!
That’s really saying something, given the success of my past enterprises. I expect we’ll reach that milestone within the next two or three years.
At this stage of life, I’m giving back so to speak.
My life has been wonderful and filled with more freedom and liberty than most ever people experience – despite my 2-year sabbatical.
That’s what I call my 2-year prison term, which was spent mostly as a bus driver for inmates and staff in addition to most of my free time spent in the on-site law library crafting the company that I’ve now been running since 2006.
After all my experience, I wanted to share the knowledge I’ve gained from a lifetime of the best and worst of times.
But especially, I want to show you and others the miraculous opportunity you have, right now, and may not even know it.
I lived through the technical revolution which took us from a non-tech society to a global population using computers and the internet every single day.
I know firsthand the miracle that awaits you. All you need to improve financially is a little knowledge. And I’m here to provide it.
You truly can improve your financial condition regardless of where you’re at right now. I’m living proof of it. The 3 major successes I’ve had – including this one – all started when I had nothing.
Odds are, you’re doing okay but want to do better. If you’re not doing as well as you want, my courses can help you reach your financial goals.
What I do know is regardless of your personal circumstance right now, I can help you make it better – a lot better.
I’m excited to show you the things I have learned about building wealth online.
Let’s do this!
– Richard
A Tough Loss Ends With A Win
How A Hard Experience Inspired Me To Start Ranking Trainer
Handicapped Distributors, Inc. (HDI) was started by our founder, Richard Gaustad in the late 1980’s. It was eventually subjected to wrongful prosecution in 1991. But the silver lining was that the company’s investors sued the government and the end result was the case was dropped and a front-page article in the hometown newspaper where Mr. Gaustad lived at the time, disclosed that the government never had a case in the first place. The HDI investors instructed him to restart the business. He did so. The newly restarted company eventually grew to nearly double the original $18M annual revenue to about $30M. The original promo video for this company, plus the front page newspaper article exonerating Mr. Gaustad and the company are presented below. This is a great example of the classic story “Three Feet From Gold” (a 3-minute read – well worth it) as told in the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napolean Hill. The videos and article below provide insight into Mr. Gaustad’s lengthy business history and the tenacity required to build any business, even YOUR business.
This experience along with the subsequent losses expressed in “My Personal Business Story” above, provided the inspiration to start the enterprise I have now been running for about 17 years. I’ve been helping companies succeed online, providing communications services and helping anyone who wants to increase their income to achieve their goals since 2006. It has been a thrilling ride!
It appears that my current enterprise will have several times the annual revenue of my previous largest company before I sell it to a larger firm. In the meantime, I expect our current rapid growth will continue and increase because the services I provide are badly needed all over the world.
When you work with any of my companies, Ranking Trainer, RTECH or Voifone, you get nothing but the best in product and service.
Here's Some Content Showing Previous Success and Exoneration
