News from Ray
December 15, 2016
By Ray Diaz · August 2026
Ask most actors about the best moment of their career and they will give you a set, a premiere, a callback that finally landed.
Mine is a date. December 15th, 2016.
That is the day Andy Frisella, the founder of 1st Phorm, gave me my first sponsorship. Not a product seeding. Not a discount code. My first six figure deal, at a moment when the entire idea of a trained actor becoming the face of a fitness brand was still something people were squinting at.
Here is what I need you to understand about that. It was not the money that changed me, although the money was real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It was that somebody with something to lose looked at me and decided I was worth the risk.
Andy was expanding a brand he had built with his own hands. He could have picked anybody. He picked me, and then he did the thing that actually matters. He trusted me to lead by example. He did not hand me a script. He handed me a standard and expected me to live up to it in public, every day, whether or not anyone was filming.
I took that personally. I represented that brand all the way. And the brand did great, which is the only review that counts.
There is one more piece to this and I will never leave it out. That deal came to me through Dan Fleyshman. He brokered the biggest moment of my career to that point and he did not take a single percentage point. Not one. If you have spent any time in this business you know how rare that sentence is.
What came out of that deal is the part I am proudest of. I turned around and built on Fitplan, a ninety day functional training program first and a four week strength and hypertrophy plan after it, and I was one of the first influencers to do it. Everybody does this now. At the time nobody did. I had already run eighteen national commercials and a modeling career, so I understood how to hold a camera's attention. I took that formula into what we were still calling new media and showed other creators how to turn attention into something they owned.
That was my back door into Hollywood. I could not get in through the front, so I built a door.
So when somebody asks me when everything changed, I do not describe a feeling. I give them a date.
December 15, 2016.