Ep 289 | 7 Power Strategies for Efficient Business Scaling and Residual Income

Have you ever wondered how to transition from working in your business to working on it? Prepare to be inspired as we sit down with Ryan DeMent, who shares his compelling journey of navigating the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. Discover the critical importance of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and the strategic moves that allowed Ryan to step back from daily operations. Learn how leveraging virtual assistants for tasks like video editing, social media, and YouTube management can free up your time for high-impact, revenue-generating activities. Ryan’s insights into resource reallocation and growth mindset will empower you to streamline operations, attract more attention, and drive your business to new heights.

Unpack the ultimate goal of transforming your sales funnel to work efficiently for you. We delve into effective training and management techniques that ensure a smooth funnel process, emphasizing the payoff of investing time in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and training videos. Ryan shares his experience of creating a streamlined top-of-the-funnel strategy to scale his business by adding more loan officers and realtors. The conversation reveals the keys to stepping back from daily operations, focusing on referrals, and generating residual income. Tune in to understand how to transform your sales funnel and achieve sustainable growth.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:21

Hey guys, ryan Ament, hope you guys are having a great day. It happened again the roller coaster of rates. I want to talk about mindset, but then also, as entrepreneurs, we focus on working in the business and not on it, and I know we've spoken about this topic. But I want to go into more depth with the actual topic itself. We're having some headwinds in our project and so forth, and I'm hoping we have some offers. We've got some great interest, so we'll get that going. But the thing that I really want to focus in on is mindset and being able to focus on growing the business, expanding the business and what that looks like. And you're probably saying, ryan, that's just something we talk about all the time. It is.

Speaker 1: 1:17

But as I get further along in this challenge, I tend to have more clarity, and the clarity is the more I work in the business, the more detrimental I am to the business. But I also hear the other side of it is how do I get out of the business? Well, you've got to hire people. Well, you don't have the capital. Let's say you've got a side hustle going. We don't have the capital to hire four or five people right now. Well, how do we find effective ways to be able to get out of the business. And one thing that has been working well for me is virtual assistants. I have two now. One does very specifically video editing the podcast, and she helps out with social media posts. Then I have another one that is specifically focused on YouTube, because YouTube is, or has been, a bugaboo for me for the longest time. I want to be able to see if we can grow the channel. We've got like 25 or 2600 subs but it's not monetized. Once I can get monetized, it's not the money, it's the eyeballs that I want on our videos, on our topics. That is a challenge, because then I get in front of more people, to where I have more conversations with individuals, which brings in more revenue, which allows us to grow the business, which then allows us to bring in key players. It all ties into this.

Speaker 1: 2:52

But the first place we have to start is mindset, and how do you physically pull yourself back to where you're not working in the business day in and day out? The only way I know how to describe this for myself is I've had to slowly but surely pull back the reins on certain things and figure out how can I allocate funds. How can I allocate funds to, like using Fiverr or a VA, to where they can take some of the basic things that I'm doing on a daily basis and move them off my plate, have them take it on to where? Now I'm focused on taking inbound calls, making outbound calls, revenue generating tasks that grow the business. That is a huge obstacle that I've been facing for months, if not over years, and I was always too afraid to be able to say, okay, we'll spend X amount of dollars to get this task off my plate. Can I tell you why? No, I can tell you. It was a crappy mindset. And now that I can see that it's freeing up time to where I get to talk to more people, I get to work through more situations, to where they generate revenue, that's huge. But what got me there was I was sick and tired of thinking worrying, focusing in on the topics that were not revenue generating. So, like the podcast, it's a great lead in. It brings people in, it brings guests in, it gets eyeballs. Is it revenue generating? No, because I haven't put it out there to become revenue generating Now. Do I want it to be? Yes, a next step, potentially, I want to first get YouTube flowing, because that will get into the podcast.

Speaker 1: 4:47

So the other aspect is then what other items, tasks, to-dos that I can take off of my list and give them to my VA? And that was social media posting. She does that exclusively. Now I do post some reels and some basic posts, but that's about it. She does everything else. She's also reacting. She's also reacting. She's also commenting. She's also communicating with people. So that's helping out a lot Now that I don't have to sit there and come up with social media ideas, video editing, anything. To that extent, it now allows me to do some outreach. I'm doing a lot more email marketing on a weekly basis. I'm consistent. I was not consistent before putting my message out there to close to about a thousand realtors and about 500 renters. So I'm working on that.

Speaker 1: 5:43

The other aspect is I'm able to pick up the phone and start calling people that I otherwise could not follow up with. Before I was dropping leads. So now I can actually have leads come into my funnel. I can work them through my CRM effectively. When I say effectively, a lot more effective than I was before. I think I could still do more.

Speaker 1: 6:03

And then the last aspect is I'm able to give potential clients the attention that they require to get deals done. It's the attention and focus that I would require to get deals done from my perspective if I was on the other side. Is there more of a runway there to be able to focus and get even more linear to where I get really skinny on that bottom of that funnel? Yes, but the challenge I'm at right now is this I don't want to go so crazy to where I outsource everything and then I've got this overhead problem and then if something happens, then I've got this overhead problem and then if something happens, boom. But also at the same time is in my mind I'm saying, if I actually do what I'm supposed to do and be able to provide that customer service and experience where that client is vested in what we're doing, whether it be real estate developing or loans, then that person won't leave me, that person won't leave TrueVest, that person won't leave Red Enterprises.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So there's a lot of different avenues that I'm trying to plug, but I have to stay hyper and I'm using linear again linear on this process, because when I've got the top of the funnel and it's so wide and I'm capturing this net to where I have five, six, seven leads coming in at a time, I get overwhelmed, it slows me down. I just I kind of tune it out. So the only way I know how to solve that problem is, as they come in, I put them in a scale of one to five One meaning it's going to, they're going to have to wait and we'll work through it. Or five is they've got a hot deal or whatever they're trying to do with us develop, buy a house to do with us develop, buy a house. And then that gets my attention in the triage, in the emergency room, to where we are focused on the people that are injured the most or need the most attention. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing a triage with the business. It's started to help.

Speaker 1: 8:29

I'm starting to refine the process, but I feel that there's a lot more I can do. And this is where I want to add another VA in here to where that VA could be an assistant that filters a lot of that out, where I can put an SOP together and be able to teach him or her what I'm looking for and then put a score on these and then, once they identify the score and we can agree on it, then they could actually send out the appropriate documents or request the items that were needed. So now I'm not really focused on the top of the funnel, I'm focused on the bottom of the funnel. As they start coming down, I get to see them and know exactly where they're at. That could be another choke point, and I'm just going to be transparent about it. They could get down to that skinny of that linear part of the funnel and it has issues, to where there's stuff missing, to where I can't do anything. So that will be a training issue. That will be an SOP thing. That will be me being hyper-focused on making sure that everything is working through that funnel.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Is this going to take time? By all means? Yes. Is it something I'm willing to put the time and effort into? Yes, do I fight it mentally on a daily basis? Yes, just because it's change.

Speaker 1: 9:50

But this is a drastic change to where I'm not doing the work and letting go of all the work and saying I'm going to depend on somebody else. One is hard, but two, I've got to make sure they're trained properly. That's where I've got to put the time in after hours to put an SOP together, put some videos together, walk them through examples and have them work files with me that make the process easier on them to understand what I'm looking for before it gets to that bottom of the funnel. No, because it's more work, but in the long run it will. And it's basically a system and everybody has a system to work their deals. But I have not had an effective one. I'm just being open and honest. It's not been effective. What I need to do is continue to work through this system, work on this funnel, to make sure that we're ready to go and I can start putting some deals in there slowly but surely and see how they fan out once they get to me in that linear part of the actual funnel.

Speaker 1: 11:00

But the one last thing I want to talk about and we can wrap this up I don't want to see those get to the bottom part of the funnel and there be problems. So, knowing me, I'm going to be in tuned on the top and Matt almost said micromanaging I will be managing what this VA is doing, he or she's doing for me at the top, and that comes down to training guys. The time and effort that you put into training pays off. It takes a lot of time upfront, but once you get done with it, it will work. I'm three weeks into it and I'm still going through the SOPs. I'm still going through videos.

Speaker 1: 11:44

But I know when I get this launched out and I can get somebody that can work the top of the funnel for me, it's going to change my life to where I can then focus on scaling the bottom of the funnel to where I can bring on additional loan officers, I can bring on realtors and start having a dual license team working for me.

Speaker 1: 12:05

That's the ultimate goal. I want to be able to step out of the business, hand off these referrals. I'll be referral king junior and be able to just take the referrals and keep on working on the residual income. Of course there'll be deals that I'll work on, but at the end of the day I don't need to work on deals if I've got a team that has a flow that's working. That is the ultimate goal Mindset shift work. The funnel train develop. Make the funnel work for you instead of you working for the funnel. I don't know why that's game changing for me, but it is. It's taking me this long to get there, but I know in the end I will continue to push and get this right and refine it, but it's the time and effort upfront that needs to be done before it will actually work.