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Today’s episode features an enlightening conversation with 
business coach and entrepreneur, Tanner O’Brien. As a partner in a thriving family-owned ActionCOACH franchise, Tanner has firsthand experience navigating the challenges and triumphs of entrepreneurship—from nearly running out of cash to building a business that truly operates as an asset, not a job.
Tanner’s diverse background in fitness, finance, and leadership, coupled with his journey as both a business owner and coach, provides a rich foundation for today’s discussion. Throughout the episode, he unpacks practical strategies for transforming your company into a machine that can work for you, instead of relying on you. Host Dave Wolcott leads the conversation, drawing out actionable advice for audience members at all stages—whether you’re a seasoned business owner, an aspiring entrepreneur, or someone ready to transition from passive income to a business of passion.
Tanner emphasizes the importance of building a strong foundation, leveraging systems, tracking key metrics, and aligning your team for scalability, freedom, and long-term success. Drawing from decades of ActionCOACH’s proven frameworks as well as his own personal lessons, Tanner gives both encouragement and tactical steps to help entrepreneurs prepare for growth and even a future exit.
In This Episode
- The biggest mistakes business owners make and how to avoid them
- How to create systems, KPIs, and team alignment to build a business that truly runs without you
- The fundamental steps every entrepreneur should take before hiring or scaling
- Exit strategies and how to prepare your business for a successful transition in the future
You cannot manage what you do not measure, so we have to do the measurement work first. What that measurement work allows us to do is to determine what are the greatest bottlenecks in the business and what’s actually working.
Welcome to the Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy podcast, where we help entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes, gambling your future on the stock market, and want to learn about hidden strategies making your money work for you? And now, your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the bestselling book The Holistic Wealth Strategy.
How’s it going, everyone? And welcome back to another episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. On this show, we often talk about investing and protecting your wealth. But before you can invest, you first need to create capital. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is through entrepreneurship.
Today I’m joined by Tanner O’Brien, a business coach and partner in a family-owned ActionCoach franchise that helps entrepreneurs transform their companies into true assets. Tanner has walked the path himself — from working in fitness and finance to building businesses, navigating partnerships, nearly running out of cash, and ultimately scaling a coaching practice that helps other owners systematize, grow, and prepare their companies for long-term freedom or exit.
In our conversation, Tanner breaks down the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make, how to avoid being the bottleneck in your business, and why building a strong foundation with systems, KPIs, and team alignment is the ultimate key to creating a business that works for you, not because of you.
If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or even thinking about starting something on the side, this episode will give you clarity on how to create the freedom of money, time, and purpose by building your business like a machine. Let’s dive in. Tanner, welcome to the show.
Hey Dave, thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, awesome to have you on today and looking forward to today’s discussion, which I know is going to be really impactful for the audience. Because, you know, on this show, we talk a lot about investing and really protecting your money. But on the front end, you’ve also got to create capital, right?
And one of the best ways to actually create capital is as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, because you have an unlimited cap in terms of what you can make, you have exit potential, and you’re also most advantaged around the tax code — right, and what you can do as a business owner.
And just a quick refresher to the audience, which I know all of our audience is well-versed on, is Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant. Right?
And what we’re going to talk about today is really being on that “B” side of the quadrant as an actual business owner and really creating a system out of your business — which is really what Tanner is going to kind of jump into today.
And that’s really such a key, because I know it can be kind of elusive after, you know, 20 years plus of experience myself. You know, it’s always — we can be self-employed, and we want to kind of do everything ourselves as business owners. But really appreciate you being on, and why don’t we kick things off with a little bit about your story and how you got here.
As business owners, we often want to do everything, but real freedom comes from creating a system out of your business.
Oh, that’s a fun one. Well, I’m excited to dive in. I think there are a lot of things that hopefully we’ll be able to find some valuable nuggets for the listeners as we walk through this here today.
But yeah, a little bit of background, I guess, on me — currently in a family business. So anyone who wants to know all the horror stories that come along with being in a family business — I’m in business with both my parents, owning our ActionCoach franchise.
But rewind 15-ish years ago, I got out of school with a degree in psychology. Not wanting to go on to grad school, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but was really into fitness. So I became a personal trainer and I worked for a company called Lifetime Fitness. I was up in the Twin Cities, up in Minnesota, having a lot of fun with it and realizing something really important that’s now pivotal to a lot of things in my current career — and that’s the fact that I was on 100% commission, and I sucked at sales.
I had no idea what I was doing, so I was not really living the life that I wanted to live after leaving school. Fast forward about a year out of that, I decided to go back to my hometown in Mason City, Iowa, and joined a Chamber of Commerce as their Program Director, making less than 30 grand a year. It was awesome — but I learned a lot about entrepreneurship, learned a lot about local small businesses.
And about that time is when my dad actually bought into the ActionCoach franchise. So I had this opportunity to start seeing his journey alongside my own. I continued on, became an Executive Director for a downtown association, built that organization up a bit, then moved into the banking world, joining a really, really small credit union. I’m talking like there were seven team members — I was number seven — and I was handed the Mortgage Department.
So anyone that understands the finance world, having zero experience, zero training, and all of that kind of stuff, being handed an entire department that is highly regulated, it’s a little bit of a scary thing to learn — trial by fire, which is exactly what it was.
So I had a couple of years of learning through that under some pretty amazing leadership at that small credit union, and then made this crazy move down to Texas.
In that transition, I ended up going to work for Bank of America. Within a year — not even a year — they promoted me up to a Vice Presidency role, and I was actually a Wealth Management Lending Officer, meaning I got to do mortgage loans for all of the amazing high-net-worth clients that were part of the Merrill team.
I did that, and then COVID hit, and I got really frustrated with a lot of things that were going on during that time — difficult to get some loans done, things like that, especially being at a larger institution.
And there was this moment when my dad came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been doing this ActionCoach franchise for a bit, and I am a single operator, a single coach. Can’t really hire a whole bunch of team members, things like that. But I’d like to start transitioning to a point where I actually own a business that can work without me one day — which means we need to build it into an actual business.”
So he asked me if I’d be interested in doing that with him because he loved the coaching piece, and asked me if I wanted to come in and really do more of the operations, sales — really all the other components of the business that hadn’t really been worked on in the past.
So of course I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a great transition,” and decided to jump into that full time. That’s been right about five years ago now. We’ve grown our business from there, gone through all of the same things that many of our clients go through — from learning the basics of building the business from where it was at that point, learning our financials, time mastery, marketing and sales, hiring a team, having to fire a bunch of team members, almost running out of cash, merging with a partner, splitting a partnership — you name it, pack it into a little five-year period.
There’s a lot of things that have taken place and given us a way to cut our teeth a little bit further on business ownership, in addition to being able to work on that with a lot of our clients. So a lot of crazy stuff in there, but this whole journey and trajectory has allowed us to continue helping local small businesses and grow those into true assets that they can exit one day and be able to live the life that they want to live.
Yeah, very cool. So tell us about, you know, really kind of your expertise, what you guys bring to the table, and how you can really help those businesses out there — owners out there — or folks who are actually thinking about creating a business. Right? Because I know we have a lot in the audience who could be either creating a side hustle or people that might want to pivot at some point. Once they get enough passive income going, they can actually transition into a business that they’re really passionate about and really love. But there’s, you know, there’s a lot of nuance to business and everything. So how do you guys really help business owners throughout the life cycle?
Yeah, so I’ll answer this as a fairly simple component first, and then there’s a lot of details that we can get into on it. But when it comes to how we help grow businesses, it comes down to two basic frameworks. I should give a little bit of context that Action Coach Global Franchise has been around for 32 years. It was business coaching before business coaching became cool — a really incredible organization that operates in, I believe, about 84 countries at this point. There are literally thousands of franchise partners across the world. Through this system, there are two primary frameworks that we operate on that can be plugged into any business we work with.
We’ve had the opportunity to work with just about any industry — from manufacturing to restaurants to quick service to marketing companies and other professional services. Again, you name it, we’ve probably had some sort of experience there. And these systems work the same in each one. The first one is what we call the six steps to building a business, and it starts with the level of mastery. Mastery is broken into destination — essentially, where are we going with the business? How do we set that end destination? Because if we don’t know where we’re headed, it’s really hard to navigate the path to get there. Delivery — is it consistent? Are we delivering our product or service with consistent quality? And then what I call resource allocation, which is broken into time and financials. Can we allocate those resources in the business effectively?
Once we have mastery, then we can move into niche, which is really just marketing and sales. As we get that foundation set, then we start moving up into leverage, which is systems — starting the process of building the team. Then we get into team and leadership, putting a general manager in place so that the owner can start to step out and get into what we call synergy, or really the duplication phase of business. That’s the point where the business can operate without you, and you can either duplicate it — for example, going from one location to twenty — or take some of that passive income and start looking at buying additional businesses or investing in real estate or the stock market, whatever makes the most sense for the overall plan. That’s really the top piece, which we call results.
So every business goes through that journey of six steps. Now, some may come to us with a really good foundation and just need some repairs as they prepare to grow. Others come to us very early on — just starting, maybe with a side hustle beginning to make a little money — and we’re really focused on those bottom two layers, ramping up the destination and marketing and sales pieces so they can get to the next level and start to take a step back out.
That’s really framework number one. The second framework is a marketing and sales one that we call the five ways. We break revenue, customers, and profit down into their component parts to work on things that we can control. I can’t tell you to “go get more profit,” but we can work on getting more leads or improving our conversion rate. There are very specific strategies we can use to work on those, so we break it down into something tactical that we can actually improve within a business.
Yeah, there are so many things to learn from franchise businesses. I love that it’s really a machine that’s operating. One of my favorite authors and business coaches is Keith Cunningham — he was actually one of Kiyosaki’s original “rich dad” mentors. In his book The Road Less Stupid, a phenomenal book, he talks about creating a business like a machine. You want to create something that can function without you, even if you’re not there, and really be able to scale through all the different functions — marketing, sales, operations, all those different things.
I think franchises do it so well because there’s so much history that comes into it. You said Action’s been around for 32 years?
That’s right.
So it’s literally 32 years of perfecting the model. And then what you guys have been doing — all the franchisees contributing to that. You take something like Starbucks or McDonald’s — whether you like it or not, it’s a phenomenal model. You can see how replicable it is and how it totally works as a machine when they put systems in place. I think there’s a lot we can all learn from that as business owners trying to create some of that same machine. So where do you really see some of the biggest mistakes that business owners make in running their businesses?
If I were to boil it down to one primary mistake that I most often see, it’s a lack of visibility — or a lack of desire — to know the numbers within the business. Understanding the numbers really tells the story for everything else. If we don’t understand what those financial numbers are — whether it’s the P&L, the balance sheet, or knowing how to read them — or even taking it a step further: do I know what my gross margin is on the products or services I provide? Do I know my acquisition cost? Do I know the lifetime value of my customer? If we don’t know these metrics, it becomes very difficult to understand where breakdowns are happening within the business.
From a financial standpoint, it’s things like that. But then, from a marketing and sales side, many newer business owners who are jumping in haven’t really mastered marketing and sales. They might get a few sales, which looks good, but they can’t repeat it consistently because they don’t know how they actually got the leads in the first place. Which lead channel did it come from? If you break down the entire pipeline from initial interest all the way through sales, how many different steps happen? For some businesses, it’s twenty; for others, it might be three. But knowing what those are — and the conversion rate between each step — matters. If we see one step that has a 2% conversion rate and another that’s at 50% or 60%, there’s much more room for improvement in the one that’s 2% or 3%. Those small numbers, with minor tweaks, can have a huge downstream impact.
It’s one of those things that’s just not often taught. But when we start to break down what the math looks like and how to apply it, we can move on to the next piece. We joke that business is really math and people. The math part should be the easy part — we just have to make sure we’re looking at it consistently. It’s not the most fun part of a business, so it often gets overlooked.
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, right? Because similar to investing, you know, in the world of business ownership, right, there’s literally no training, right? Even if you go out and get an MBA, a lot of those skills you’re not going to use as a business owner. But you have to learn all of these different functions. And yeah, depending on your background, where you came from, maybe you’re not necessarily analytical or financial in terms of looking at those key KPIs that are really driving the business and what you need to do. But yeah, you’ve got to have visibility in it. And this is actually a good lens on this for the audience as well — if you’re investing in companies to buy on the venture side or angel side, these are also really key things to look for in companies that are running really well that you might want to invest in. So, okay, KPIs — having metrics and visibility into the organization.
Anything else? Not getting the fundamentals right first — that’s probably the second big thing that I tend to see. So, as an example, take a business that goes out and decides to hire a bunch of team members, really focus on their operating systems, some of those types of components, before understanding where their time’s going, before understanding the financial numbers, before getting what we call predictable cash flow from marketing and sales.
And you see this a lot from newer business owners. They’re jumping into their first business, whether it’s a franchise or it’s a business they bought or something they’ve started from the ground, and thinking, “I need to go hire everybody under the sun right from day one.” They haven’t learned the skill set of managing people yet. They haven’t learned the skill set of what to look for and how to hire somebody. They get people on the team and then get kind of this burned-out feeling because they have two or three people that end up either not staying very long or maybe they didn’t work out and they have to let them go. And they’re like, “Well, I just don’t want to hire anyone anymore because that doesn’t work out for me. I don’t want to manage a big team.”
But there are so many steps that come before that — to know how do we install the right people on the team in the right seats, and what do those seats actually look like? Starting to build that muscle that is management, and then eventually moving into leadership and things like that. Jumping too quickly to team, especially if you don’t have a big runway — a lot of newer businesses don’t.
Let’s say you buy a new business, right? We see this happen all the time. New entrepreneur comes in, they decide they’re going to buy a business. They look at the purchase costs and things like that. They buy the business, but they don’t allocate enough for operating funds for the first three to six months, and they run out of runway. And if you do that, then it’s really difficult to hire team members when they haven’t been in there before. And if you haven’t learned the skill set of managing, it can be very easy to burn through that cash flow and not be able to recoup it as quickly as possible. That tends to be where we see some of these smaller businesses get into trouble early on.
Yeah, I mean, the numbers are quite staggering, right? I mean, isn’t it like less than 5% make it through even year one, and then only 1% make it to like year five or what? I mean, you probably know the stats, but it’s definitely — the odds are against you, right?
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of risk when it comes to business. And it goes back to the fact that we oftentimes don’t know what we don’t know, and some of those things that we don’t know can really bite us in the butt. But there is a path forward, and I think that’s where having mentors or folks that you can trust in your corner — whether it’s just mentors that you know, folks like yourself, or business coaches like what we do — having somebody that can help you see around those corners really increases that ability to make it more than just a year or just the first five years.
Yeah. Do you guys recommend like a typical ramp rate, or maybe this is in your framework that you have or something? So, you know, I think the reality is, right, most entrepreneurs are really bootstrapped and capital constrained. So as they try to scale the business, how do they make strategic decisions around how to allocate resources — not only money, but time? Like, where do you spend your time? Because it could be marketing, could be sales, could be operations, could be anything, right?
You know, I think there are a lot of different ways to effectively answer that question. It’s going to depend on the business and where they’re at. I think for me it’s always going to come back down to the numbers. Are we understanding what those numbers look like on the front end? If we have the proper model on the front end, it can be easier to recoup cash more quickly.
That being said, really understanding the numbers — I’m going to come back to that because I think that’s really the most important piece. If we understand what that looks like, then we can effectively plan out what the first one, two, three, four months look like. Do we have enough runway? What does that number need to be? If it’s a larger business and it’s a very capital-intensive type business with longer payment periods, then the ramp-up period may take longer. It’s just going to take us longer to cycle through cash.
If it’s a services-based business similar to what we are, the cash cycle is so much faster. So having one to two months of operating capital is easier than a manufacturing company that may have a 90-plus day cash return window.
Yeah, that makes sense. And are you targeting some type of ideal metrics, like let’s say a 10 to 15% EBITDA type of business?
Traditionally, I’m going to be a big fan of, you know, 20% where possible to get to profitability. But that’s going to be driven by — can we run the business effectively so that the profitability of a business can fund the rest of your life?
We’re big believers in the fact that you don’t get into business just because you love business and want to work 80 hours a week and all of that fun stuff. The reason most of us get into business tends to be freedom — financial freedom, time freedom — and to be able to live the life that we want to live. So how does the business play the role that’s going to allow you to achieve that?
So focusing more on the 20% where possible — and some industries may be slightly lower, but there are definitely some industries that should have something higher, probably closer to 30 or 35% in terms of an EBITDA margin. Ultimately, where do we want to go from an exit standpoint? If the business is really small, businesses are going to be valued on a multiple of profitability by and large. So being able to ensure that we have consistent profitability and we can show what that cash flow looks like — and does that number match up with what you would need that exit to be to live the life that you want to live?
Yeah. How about from an executive compensation standpoint? I know that this is actually a pretty confusing topic, right? It seems like it would be pretty straightforward, but a lot of our audience are very savvy investors. And again, one of the reasons as an entrepreneur that you can take most advantage of the tax code is being a business owner, doing various things. So do you have any recommendations in terms of that? I’ve literally read books that people do everything from setting it up like a sports team where you have a cap — you have like a salary cap with what you pay people, including yourself — and then you move into the profit side of the equation that can be kind of an upside for profit. Or is it reasonable compensation until you’ve reached a certain threshold that then people can start investing from the business? Or do you have any guidelines there you can talk about?
Yeah, I’ll give you some of the pieces that I’ve been taught and how we share some of this knowledge now. I’ll put a caveat on this: on some of the ideas or structures or ways of doing this, make sure you’re consulting the right professionals. When it comes to true executive comp, especially as we think about many of our clients, there are some resources that we will refer out to when it really starts to look at some complex compensation type things.
That being said, traditionally how I would look at it or how I would talk to many of our clients if they’re looking for some general guidance: “I’m starting to run this business, I’m taking some money out of salary, starting to look at profitability — how do we structure this thing for long-term growth and being able to build wealth and investing?”
I tend to be a big fan of having really the holding company, or what we would call kind of the wealth entity, that ultimately would own the ownership within the businesses that you own. So for me, as an example, I’ve got my wealth entity — our coaching company is one of the entities that it owns. I’ve got a secondary business that is also owned by that company.
When I start investing in real estate and things like that, all of it will fall underneath that wealth entity. So anything that I don’t need to take as salary is then funneled up through into the wealth company, and then it can be either distributed from there or reallocated into other investments, depending on what that ultimately looks like for me. I’m a big fan of looking at businesses to buy — that just tends to be my skill set — so that’s where I tend to look.
Being able to have the entity there that’s ready to make a purchase for a business tends to make a lot of sense. So it gives a little bit of flexibility or understanding of how to flow some of those things through.
If we’re shooting for 20% profitability in the business, we should be setting some profitability aside every single month so that we can start getting in the habit of keeping money and being able to use that for investing. Start with filling your reserve account — make sure you’ve got six to nine months of reserves — and once that piece is taken care of, then start looking at the investments that make the most sense for you. That’s traditionally where we will then outsource and refer out to all of our wonderful partners that understand investing and some of that stuff a little bit deeper than we do.
Yeah. Now, how about on the exit side? How should people be really building their businesses if they have an exit in mind at some point in the future? Is there anything that they can be doing today? Or maybe that exit is even closer than we think. How should they be thinking to line this up strategically?
Yeah. So I’ll preface this by answering the question that some people may be asking, which is essentially, “Well, what if I don’t want to exit my business?” My general response to that is everybody will exit their business, whether it’s our choice or not, whether it’s vertically or horizontally. So we might as well prepare for having a business that can one day work or be able to be passed on without us.
That being said, what can we do? Walking through these six steps is going to be the most critical component of understanding what that looks like. The ultimate goal is that there is consistent cash flow coming through the business. There is nothing that is tied to you as the owner anymore. We’ve got to get the things that are inside our head out into either systems, processes, or people.
One of the biggest things when it comes to a business transaction — if I go and I’m going to look at a business today and I’m going to buy a business — I will look at it not just on the multiple of net income, but there will be subtractions and add-backs. And one of the subtractions against their value is going to be: what are all the things that the owner does in the business that nobody else can do?
If they tell me it’s the sales, it’s the delivery, it’s this and that — each one of those is going to be a person that we have to then add back into the business to be able to sustain the cash flow that it currently has. So that’s all going to be discounting against net income and ultimately decreasing the value of the business.
As owners, we can start to step away from the doing work and start to put people in place that can do it and have systems they can run. We build systems so people can run the systems. Those are the most important things that we can do.
Now, for some businesses, we can do this inside of a year or two. It’s a lot of work in most cases if you have not been thinking about this before, but it can be done in that time period. For many others, it’s, “Hey, I’m three, five, seven years out from even considering an exit.” This is the perfect time to start building that. And you may reach that point where you can step away completely earlier, but it then gives you the flexibility and the choice of doing a deal on your terms versus having to take a deal because it’s the only terms you’re going to get.
Yeah, makes sense. And your model, you guys offer coaching and also education around how to help people get there?
Yes, I’d say by and large it tends to be the coaching side of things — really the accountability partner. Most businesses have a pretty good sense of the things that need to be done but still don’t do them. I talk to so many business owners who are like, “Yes, I know I should be doing that, but I still don’t do it.” That is a big component of where we come in.
And then being able to look around the corner and say, “Here are some things you haven’t thought about before. Here are some other examples from other industries that you’ve been in.” Things like that. From an education standpoint, whether it’s for team members or early-stage entrepreneurs, is traditionally where the education really fits in.
Early-stage entrepreneurs may not be quite ready for coaching yet, but they may need 12 weeks on just understanding the basics of business. They may need to go through a 12-week sales program — for sales team members, management team members, or people that aren’t traditionally trained in those fields but are now playing those roles within business. Being able to provide effective education that ties into the longevity of the business and supports those skill sets — a little bit of the education side and a lot on the accountability, partner, and coaching side of things.
If you think every entrepreneur is about to exit at some point in time, what are the top things that they could really do to prepare themselves now?
Top things that they could do to prepare today if they’re looking to exit — I think the very first thing that any entrepreneur could do today is a true time study or time audit. Take a look at everything that you currently do, figure out how much time that’s taking, and then see if there’s anybody else in the business that can take things off your plate.
Whether or not you actually can move them off today, being able to identify what you’re doing is probably step number one, because then we can start to build a plan around how to start offloading those effectively. Which team members do we need to hire next? What are the systems we need to build around each of these things? Where am I the bottleneck as the business owner?
That’s probably the number one thing you could do that’s the easiest first step to take. Then we can start to build a plan and look at what numbers we’re not currently tracking within the business. Let’s do a deep evaluation of our marketing and sales and then start moving into some of the systems and team components. So the first initial thing would probably be a time study — the easiest, most impactful thing any business owner could do.
And how would you evaluate allocation of resources? I mean, that’s something I struggle with all the time. There’s always something to do. If we focus on adding a new team member to the team, we’re going to increase customer service or something, and that’s going to have some type of return to it. Or do we invest in some new marketing platform or process or something like that, which would have a return and a particular payback? But you’re really making assumptions — at the end of the day, you’re making a lot of different assumptions on how something could work.
So how do you effectively coach people on how to make the best decisions with really what they have?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there’s a couple of ways that I tend to look at this. The first one’s gonna be — I’m a huge believer in you cannot manage what you do not measure. So we have to do the measurement work first. What that measurement work allows us to do is to determine what are the greatest bottlenecks in the business and what’s actually working.
So if we take marketing as an example, I’m a firm believer that any marketing strategy can and does work. It blows my mind. I know a half a billion dollar company that is heavily focused on telemarketing and it works for them.
I never pick up my phone if it’s a number I don’t recognize. But you know, it’s a strategy that does work consistently, but they’ve figured out how to make it work. So in any business, I look for the things that are working first and then we do more of that and we make some tweaks to make it a little bit better. And then we do more and we do better until we are finally ready to do something different or new.
So that framework is going to be the first thing that I’m going to do. It’s the most cost effective, it’s already proven and has historical results. So we’re not guessing on something. We can start to focus on things that we already know are going to provide the results that we’re looking for and continue to amplify them until the results no longer hold.
Now that can be a marketing strategy. That could be sales conversion. That could be how we manage the effectiveness within our fulfillment or delivery. But then we start looking at what are the biggest constraints. If I were to triple my lead flow tomorrow, what’s going to break first? Can my sales team manage that level of lead flow? The answer is no. Then there may be a bottleneck there. That is one of the next hires that we need to make.
Maybe that’s not the constraint, but we just can’t fulfill on that level. So then we look at maybe that’s the first constraint that we’re going to alleviate and fix before we start to increase the level on the front end. So those are going to be the first components that I’m looking at.
It’s a long answer because it really does depend on the business that we’re talking to and kind of where they’re at in their journey.
From a time perspective, I think one of the biggest things is when you do a time study, you do a time audit and you find things that you can take off your plate. It’s knowing what are you going to do with that time if it’s freed up for you? Most of us want to go, “I’m working 80 hours a week. I’d love to just have five hours back.”
But what do we do with those five hours? Can we allocate that now to something that’s a higher leveraged item within the business until we can finally offload that off our plate? If we want to pay for this team member that we’re going to hire, we want to ensure that we’re doing our higher leverage work — our higher dollar per hour work — that’s going to allow that to be effective more quickly.
Yep. Makes sense. Tanner, if you could give just one piece of advice to the audience about how they could get to that freedom, right — freedom of money, freedom of time, freedom of purpose — what would it be?
If I could give one piece of advice, take the time to build a solid foundation. It’s boring, it’s tedious, it’s not always the most fun thing to do. But if you get the foundation right, the scalability on the other side to get you to the end result faster is so much more effective and goes so much faster than your thoughts think it ever would.
Take the time to build a solid foundation. It’s boring, it’s tedious, but it makes scalability faster and easier.
Yeah. Awesome. Really appreciate having you on the show today. Some great pieces of wisdom. And if anyone would like to reach out and learn more about your coaching, your services — where’s the best place?
Yeah. So I would say there’s — I’ll give you my social profiles. I am Tanner O’Brien 001 on just about every platform. It’s a really easy way to connect with me. LinkedIn is going to be probably the easiest one.
You can email me directly at TannerOBrienRyan@actioncoach.com and from there we can point you in the direction that’s best for you.
Awesome. Thanks again, Tanner. Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Dave. Appreciate you letting me be on today.
You bet.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com — that’s holisticwealthstrategy.com.
If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com — that’s pantheoninvest.com.