Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
19 Mar 2025
What was Ryan Blair's early life like?
And you start pricing everything in your business. And the amount of money he was able to put back in our pockets in that first six months was really incredible.
That's an exceptional operator. Most people are not brave enough and smart enough to make those tough decisions. We use a zero-based budgeting method where we just look at what are a couple known factors in the business. Let's say we have 100 leads coming in. We have 100 leads. Now we need software for the leads. What do we need next? Well, we have to spend money to buy those leads.
What do we need next? We need somebody to call those leads. What do we need next? We start from one particular influx, whether it be on the revenue side or one known, we have X many customers to serve. And then you take a blank canvas and you just add back each expense one by one until you've essentialized the business.
So that you're trimming the fat that way. You're saying, what's the bare minimum of we can do to maintain our level of service?
Yeah. And maintain the level of service to your point. Yes.
Where the customer doesn't feel it.
Yeah, I have a thousand customers. So if you and I have a thousand customers that we have to serve, all right, we need, how many people do we need to serve those 1000 customers? Great. We need 10 people to serve those 1000 customers. We need one manager for those 10 people. Now you and I can run a business with one manager and 10 people.
That's all we need in the software, of course, you know, to track and manage and run some analytics. And so, you know, essentializing it to the bare minimum and then everything else that you keep should have an ROI attached to it. What is the return on investment of this expense or this employee that I'm keeping?
And then we have to drive that return on investment per expense, per program, per product, per employee to make sure that we're actualizing the ROI that we've identified. Now, that's how we would go about the additional spend is that it should be ROI generative spend outside of the essential spend.
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