Ryan Deiss | Scaling a Business Using Systems that Sets Your Free

I took this business, scaled it up, had not one, not two, but three different companies on the Inc. 500 and 5000 list in one year. From the outside looking in, everybody's telling me how great I am. You know, I'm on top of the world. I've got the Midas touch, but I'm miserable and I'm burnt out. I'm missing family dinners and I'm missing soccer games and I'm leaving for the office before anybody's awake and I'm getting home after everybody's asleep. You know, I've got my wife, I've got four kids. Nobody knows who I am. They don't. I don't ever get to see them. And it wasn't until I came home one night and there's my wife sitting up in bed and she's know of now 15 plus years and she says, you know, look, I know who I married. You can keep doing what you're doing, but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore. That for me was the breaking point when I realized, okay, I can have all the ego in the world, but this ain't working.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, membership and community. A space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs. You'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing. Plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life. I invite you to join us. Click the link to learn more and start your journey today. What does it really mean to scale a business? Not just grow it, but truly scale it. And what does it take to build something that thrives without us at the center? In this conversation with Ryan Deiss, an innovator in digital marketing and systems thinking, we go beyond the buzzwords to explore what sustainable scaling really looks like. Ryan shares his journey from college side hustle to running an influential portfolio of businesses. And he breaks down the core shifts that every founder must make to grow from scrappy entrepreneur to strategic leader. We talk about why ego is often the biggest bottleneck to delegation and how to build operating systems that create transferable value. And the vital difference between making money and building a business that lasts. My name is Dr. Fleet Mall, your co host for this session, and I'm thrilled to be here today with none other than Ryan Deiss. Welcome, Ryan.

Thanks so much for having me.

Fleet, we're so thrilled to have you. You've been a huge influence on our own success at Heart Mind Institute. And you know, I hate to ask anybody to encapsulate their story in a couple of minutes, but I'm going to ask you to do it anyway. So, you know, just get a sense of how you got started. How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur and getting into digital marketing and how did that happen and what's the backstory behind that?

Yeah, it's really simple. I met a girl. I was a freshman in college and I had no ambitions of being an entrepreneur. I had no vision ambitions of doing marketing. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I actually thought, I don't know if I ever told you this, Fleet, I thought I was going to go into vocational ministry. That's what. In my head, I thought I was going to go and be a pastor. And so. But I went to college. I met this girl within a couple of weeks of dating. I knew, like, this is the woman I'm probably going to marry now. I didn't tell her that, by the way, because I knew that was kind of creepy. Which is a marketing lesson, by the way, just in that. But I did. I mean, I was like, whoa, okay. And it was the first time in my life that I wanted something and I knew I didn't have what it took to get it. And specifically, like, I knew that I wasn't the kind of person who had the means to be like an adult, who could Support another human being. And specifically, I knew that I didn't have enough money to buy an engagement ring. I knew that diamonds were expensive, and I was broke. So I decided to start this little side hustle, selling little ebooks and things like that online, truly, just so that I could make enough money to buy this woman an engagement ring. That was it. And this was my freshman year. I didn't tell her that, but I got to work. Well, fast forward a couple of years. I had made enough money to buy the ring. I got the ring, I got the girl. And that little business eventually ballooned into, you know, initially a digital publishing company empire, mini empire, if you can call it that. And along the way, all I did was I talked about publicly what I was doing privately. And this was kind of before blogging was a thing. You know, I launched my first business in 1999, you know, so you got to think Google back then was a science fair project. You didn't have a lot of this stuff that we have. There was no social media, but I had a little email list and I invited people to subscribe to it. And every week I would just tell them what I was doing. And I did it as much for accountability as anything else. And so I kind of got a reputation and I gained a following as I guess being an expert, not because I actually knew what the heck I was doing, just because I was talking about what I was doing and I was sharing the wins and the losses, the good, the bad and the ugly. And so that was really where it all began. So I've always started businesses, I've always run businesses, and I've always talked about what the heck it was that I was doing. And that's how digital marketer came into being. It's how Scalable came into being. But I've always had businesses and then I've always had businesses that talked about what I was doing in business. And so that's kind of how I've operated really for the past 25 plus years.

Our focus today is scaling. And obviously you can share so much about marketing. So your company Scalable has really helped so many companies and so many founders and entrepreneurs figure out how to scale their business. You've got something that's working, you're probably wearing all the hats. Maybe you're a solopreneur or maybe you have a small team, but basically you got a small team of helpers. You're the expert, you're doing most of it, you're directing everything, and then where do you go from there? So I know you have a whole system for scaling and we're going to go through some of those elements. But what kind of needs to be in place before someone can even think about scaling a business? Before it would make sense to start thinking about how do I scale my business effectively?

Yeah, I think, I think we first kind of need to find the difference between growth and scale. Right. So growth is increasing any particular unit of measurement. Right. So if you're saying I want to grow my sales, right, then that's growth. What we're talking about with scale is really talking about increasing the capacity so the ability for growth to occur. And that's important because early on growth is all that matters because your capacity is fundamentally, you know, massive. Like it's limitless compared to what you have. Because what you have is nothing. Right? And most people when they're starting their business, they're high performance individuals. If you're watching this, you know right now, you're a high performance person, you can do a lot of stuff. You know, you're a bigger container than the average person that's out there. And so that's plenty to get launched, that's enough to get started and that's enough to grow. The hard lesson that I had to learn is that growth does not equal scale. And that scale is not simply growth and then more growth and more growth. So long winded way of answering your question is it's realizing the difference. What it takes to scale is realizing, number one, it's a fundamentally different playbook, it requires very different tools, but most importantly requires a different operating system. So to go basically from zero to a half a million, really up to about a million dollars in revenue, just about anybody can do that. And I don't say that to suggest that it's easy because it's not. Lots of people do hard things all the time. But just about anybody who's motivated can do that without having to go and figure out all the, you know, tricks of the trade. But going from a million to let's say 10 million revenue, now you're talking about needing to scale beyond yourself. You need to have an operating system that's more than what we just referred to as a UoS, that U operating system, because you're still just one person who only has 24 hours and who probably needs to sleep some of those times and maybe has people around you who want to hang out with you. Some sort of the big thing that you must have if you want to go from startup to scale up is you have to upgrade that operating system, it can't just be the UoS, it can't be about you. And it's the hardest thing in the world fleet because, number one, nobody told us that we needed to do it. Number two, nobody gives us a playbook for how to do it. And number three, we kind of have to die a little bit to ourself because we're so used to being that person who does everything. So in our success, we wind up getting humbled. That's, I think, the hardest thing of all.

Absolutely. And with my own company, I've been going through that and with your support. And fortunately, your company does provide a playbook for this. And so let's talk about the operating system. We're going to talk about three core components of scaling here today. And the idea is to really get the company to where you have options. And, you know, you could exit if you wanted to, or you can exit from being an operator to a true CEO, from a CEO to a board or investor, whatever, or you want to sell your company someday, but. But it's getting something that has real value, that's a marketable company. And so part of that, I know you talk about transferable value and the way you transfer that from just yourself being, you know, you're the owner, operator, and the value is all you. But if you leave, what company is there? So it probably doesn't have a lot of market value. You build that into the system and you start building that operating system. So I wonder if you could talk a bit about the concept of transferable value and about some of the core elements of building that system. It's more than we can cover all of it today, but some of the key principles.

So what it takes to scale. Scale does require the three elements. And three elements are, number one, you have to have leverage sales. So not just sales, but leverage sales. I think everybody gets that, right? We need to have sales. Okay, fine. Number two is you need to have bankable profit. So you need to have profit that is there to continue to fuel the sales. Right. Those are the two that most people think about. It's this third one that you brought up that nobody thinks about, most people don't know about, and they certainly don't optimize. And that is what's known as transferable value. And transferable value comes in two forms. The first form of transferable value is transferring the value creation process from you as the founder to other people in the organization. In other words, you're not the only person who can do all the things that's the first type of transferable value. The second type of transferable value is transferring the value of the company to somebody else in the event of the sale, or at least being able to do it. But it's at first have a transferable value that must occur first. And this is where business owners get trapped. It's where we get trapped in our own businesses. When our businesses start owning us is when we are the only ones who can actually create value in the company. Now this is going to come very often it manifests itself as you're the only person who can do the marketing, nobody else does it as well as you, or you're the only person who can close the sales, or where I see the majority of time is you're the only person who can deliver the service, you know, or who can deliver the product. Nobody else can do it as well, you know, as you can. And what we have to be able to do as business owners, if we truly want to own our business, instead of having our business own us, we need to have an operating system that allows for the value creation process to occur without us. So the question that we ask is, does the money still show up if you don't show up? If the answer is no, then you don't own a business, you're self employed, you don't own a business, your business owns you. And so that's where the operating system comes into play.

Let me interject just something there. So I think there's two blocks, you kind of referenced one of them that I know I ran into and a lot of entrepreneurs run into is nobody can do it as well as I can. And it's quicker to just do it than train somebody to do it. Right. And those things will just block you forever from appropriate delegating, getting smarter people on the team, building the systems and so forth. So I wonder, how do you see, how did you get through those blocks? How do you see people get through those blocks?

Yeah, and the brutal thing is in the beginning it's true, right? I mean, so in the beginning no one can do it as well as you can, and it is faster just for you to do it. And so that, that's what makes this so tough is because everything that is the exact right answer early on is the exact wrong answer. It's like somebody who's very like, show me the things that make you great and I'll show you the things that will ultimately destroy you. And this is true in business. So how did I get through it? I mean, I got through it by, frankly, nearly imploding, you know, the very relationship that was the thing that kicked this off. You know, I brought myself and my family to the point of, you know, break. I mean, that I took this business, scaled it up, had not one, not two, but three different companies on the Inc. 500 and 5000 list in one year. From the outside looking in, everybody's telling me how great I am. You know, I'm on top of the world. I've got the Midas touch. But I'm miserable and I'm burnt out. I'm missing family dinners and I'm missing soccer games and I'm leaving for the office before anybody's awake. And I'm getting home after everybody's asleep. You know, I've got my wife, I've got four kids. Nobody knows who I am. They don't. I don't ever get to see them. And it wasn't until I came home one night and there's my wife sitting up in bed and she's, you know, of now 15 plus years, and she says, you know, look, I know who I married. You can keep doing what you're doing, but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore. That for me was the breaking point when I realized, okay, I can have all the ego in the world, but this ain't working. And that was when I finally said, okay, I've got to figure something else out. And that is to answer your question, like, that's the honest answer to your question. Fleet, how did I do it? I had to get to an absolute breaking point where I. Cause I mean, I tried for years to do it all myself and I succeeded to a very big point because I'm a high capacity, high performance individual. And I'll tell you, the better you are at this stuff, the deeper grave you'll dig for yourself is the reality. Like, show me somebody who's a high performance, high capacity individual and I'll show you somebody who's dug a very deep hole for themselves. I don't want people to get to that point. So the reason that the scalable company exists is to let people know you don't have to go there. It's two things. One is mindset, and the second is tactical. So the first thing that I'll tell you is a mindset issue is understand that, number one, nobody will probably do everything as well as you, but lots of people can do one thing better than you. That's the first really important mindset shift that needs to take place. You're not looking for people who can do everything as well or better than you. They're not going to. It's your business. You birthed this thing. But you gotta know that there are absolutely, positively people out there who any one little thing better than you. They exist, they're out there. We just got to find them, especially if we can equip them with the right tools. The second mindset shift is there's freedom on the other side of that. Right? There's freedom on the other side of that. If we can begin handing these things off one at a time, not exiting completely from everything, but doing it one at a time, that's how the process occurs. So how do we do it? Like, tactically, practically, how do we do it? Let me tell you how. You don't do it. Oftentimes, it's easier to know what not to do. So first and foremost, it's not about you becoming more productive. So you don't need another time management system or another productivity system or another, you know, timer planner, journal kind of thing. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with that, but your goal should be to do less, not more. Okay? Also, we don't just want to hire a bunch of people and throw human beings at it when we do that. What we're actually doing is trading menial tasks that we're pretty good at for a new job, a new role called management, which most of us are pretty terrible at. Okay? So we don't simply want to throw human beings at the problems, because what winds up happening is they don't know how to do it any better than we do. We don't have time to train them how to do it. We believe going into it that they're probably not going to do it as well as us. We kind of want them to fail, if we're being honest, because that validates who we are and our identity. And so when they fail, we get to swoop in and be the savior. They quit or we fire them, and we then begin this cycle of like, well, I guess I'm the only one who can do it. Don't try to make one magical unicorn hire of the integrator who's going to run everything for you that doesn't actually work. And don't just try to grow your way through it, because that's not going to work either. What you got to do is you got to get your business out of your brain. And it starts with just taking a step back, getting up to 30,000ft and asking yourself a really simple question. Well, two really simple questions. Question number one, how do customers happen? It's one of the most basic and yet essential questions that every business owner needs to ask. How do customers or clients or patients happen? How do you get them? Many people I'll ask a business owner this question and they can describe it to me, but can you show me? When we work with clients, when we acquire a business, when we're integrating a business, this is the first thing that we do. We literally get sticky notes and we go to a whiteboard and we map it out in visual flowchart form. Okay, what do you do first? Well, we run Facebook ads. Great, Facebook ads. What else? We're also running Instagram app. Great, Instagram. They all get sticky notes. Great. Then what happens? And we visualize and map out the flow that occurs from the point of awareness until somebody buys something. This is not complicated rocket science, you know, complex business process mapping stuff. Anybody can do this. Now, once we've answered visually the question of how do customers happen? Then we answer the second critical question, which is what do we do once we've got them? How do we fulfill on the promises made during the sales process? And we do the same process, we visually map that. And felid. I know you know this because you've gone through this process with us, but once you visualize those two things, you've got a visual process map of what we call a growth engine. So the visual process flow of how you attract and convert new leads and customers, and a visual process map of your fulfillment engine, how you fulfill post sale and the promises made. What you've done is you visualize the customer journey. You can now see literally how value is created in the business. Then you can look at step by step and stage by stage and say, okay, which of these sticky notes can I start handing off to other people? And the way that you do it, the way that you delegate, tactically speaking, is one sticky note at a time. And the mistake that people make is they try to hand everything off. They try to hand off unclear jobs. If you can first visualize the value creation process, why your company exists, how you add value, and then if you hand off the tasks and the roles one or two little sticky notes at a time, before long, everybody's doing everything and you're just kind of monitoring, you're optimizing. That is the first step in creating the operating system of a business.

And I know you call these sticky notes eventually become playbooks that somebody owns. And that's the term used in your company for SOPs or standard operating procedures. I like the term playbook. I think it really gets to the point, and I love what you said before about, you know, one indicator of to the extent that we have transferred value from our head and our abilities into the company into a system is whether if we don't show up, do the sales keep showing up. And I love an analogy you use about the dancing bear. Like you're the dancing bear in your business. If you stop dancing, what happens? If you dancing on that ball, what happens?

That's the circus bear. Right. The circus bear is big and powerful, a little bit scary, but at the end of the day, bear stops, dancing, bear doesn't get paid. And there's a lot of business owners out there who. They're big and they're powerful and they're respected and even a little bit feared, but the second they stop dancing, they stop getting paid. And so we don't want that. We don't want to be that. We want to own our business. We don't want our business to own us. And so we get the business out of our brain and we put it in sticky notes on a whiteboard. Right. And we do it here. I did this recently. If people can see this. We do this all the time. We think in terms of business process maps, because. Yeah. Then every one of those sticky notes. Which of these sticky notes are really critical? Great. Let's create playbooks of these. We're going to assign names to each of those sticky notes in the beginning, every one of those. Who does this one? Me. Okay. I don't want it to be me on every one of these. So what's the person called who does some of these things? And this is how you begin hiring one sticky note at a time. How do I know these things are working? What are the metrics that I would need to track to know this is working? This is how we begin to build scorecards. Right now, when we're meeting with our team, we're talking about the metrics on the scorecard. That's how we can begin optimizing the flow. And so this is how we build operating systems within businesses. But it starts with just the simplest question in the world. How do we add value to the marketplace? And that starts with, how do we get customers? How do they happen? How do we serve them once we have them?

So understanding these growth value engines and then the scorecards that can really track the metrics to see how you're succeeding with those all contributes to the next thing we'd like to talk about leverage sales or recurring revenue. And a lot of people hear recurring revenue. They think of subscription membership programs or SaaS. And that can be one kind of recurring revenue. But also whatever business you had, if you know that you just keep doing X, you're going to get X amount of sales, right? Because you've got repeatable processes that systematize you keep doing it. I mean, there may be market changes you got to adjust to, but in general, you've got a business you keep running, the sales are going to show up, right? So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how people shift from just going after elephants all the time. I go out, I do this big program, I brought a bunch of oh great, now what's next? And I do another thing, it makes my now what's next to really building a system that's creating that revenue. Even if you step off the circus ball for a moment.

One of the most terrifying days, you know, in the month for business owners is the first of the month because for most business owners, they start back over again at zero. And so yes, there are certain tactical offer based strategies, whether it's subscription revenue.