The Ryan Hanley Show
How Elon Musk’s Strategies Can Save Your Business – Ryan Hanley
Mon, 3 Mar 2025
Ryan Hanley is a speaker, entrepreneur, and host of a podcast dedicated to helping ambitious individuals defy ordinary and achieve extraordinary success. Ryan discusses how his business was struggling due to high costs and inefficient practices. He introduces three first principle strategies that transformed his business without the need to cut staff. The first strategy is zero-based budgeting, inspired by Elon Musk, which involves justifying every expense from scratch. The second principle is the no meeting rule, which drastically reduces unnecessary meetings, improving productivity by giving the team more time to focus on actual work. Finally, Hanley emphasizes sales efficiency by focusing on improving the closing rate of current leads rather than acquiring new ones, which significantly increases profits and team morale. Takeaways: • Adopt zero-based Budgeting • Implement the no-meeting rule: • Prioritize sales efficiency Sound Bites: • "We canceled every single meeting and only added back the ones that were absolutely necessary." • "Shorter meetings lead to more productivity and efficiency because you're forced to get to the point." • "Not only were we making more money, but our customer feedback scores went through the roof." 📌 𝗙𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗢𝗪 𝗠𝗘 𝗢𝗡: Website: https://www.go.ryanhanley.com/ Course Page: https://www.masteroftheclose.com/ Apple: https://www.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ryan-hanley-show/id1480262657 Spotify: https://www.open.spotify.com/show/5AZFuTiQsgS9hMQDDdtlOr?si=98432b7806534486 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley
Chapter 1: What business challenges did Ryan Hanley face?
Our business was growing, but it was costing us a ton of money. We tried removing programs from our tech stack, but that only made things worse. Today, I'm going to break down the three first principles that we implemented that turned our cash burning startup into a cash machine. Now, here's a warning. The first two we took directly from Elon Musk.
Chapter 2: What are the three first principle strategies?
The last change, which new founders and entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to, unlocks your business in ways you never thought possible. Now, stick with me. I'm going to explain three principles that you need to know to start stacking cash instead of lighting it on fire.
in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.
What is up, guys? If you're watching this on YouTube, comment below with a fire emoji. If you are sick of burning profits that should go into your pocket, then tell me what your biggest pain point is. If we don't address it in this video, I'll make sure that we hit it in future episodes. If you're listening on the podcast, come over on YouTube, do the same.
Also, if you haven't, make sure you like the video or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching. All right, with that out of the way, let's get to these first principles that are just so incredibly important that we had to learn the hard way. So here's the deal. We kept spending more.
We were working longer hours, buying all the tools we thought our business was supposed to have, but somehow we were making less profit. every month. It felt like we were running full speed on a treadmill and the treadmill was on fire and the fire was started with dollar bills that should have been going into our pockets. It was brutal, but all startup founders, entrepreneurs, you guys get it.
Anyone who's built a business from scratch. Then we did what most businesses do. We looked at what was happening and we started cutting expenses. We slashed software, we removed tools, we canceled subscriptions. And you know what happened? it just made things worse. These were things that we actually needed, and cutting them didn't help us be more efficient and effective.
And that's exactly what happened. Efficiency dropped, team productivity fell apart, and revenue started sliding. Cutting costs wasn't the answer. So we had to go back to basics, and that's when we discovered something game-changing. Three radical strategies. Now, the first two we took from Elon Musk and basically from how he turned Twitter now X around. And the third we developed ourselves.
It's what the kids call these days fire, the good kind. It was the catalyst for record growth. And all three of these strategies are ignored, especially by early stage entrepreneurs and founders. Now, these three strategies saved our business and 10X our profit margins. without firing a single employee. So here's what we did.
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Chapter 3: How does zero-based budgeting work?
These are three rarely used strategies that absolutely transformed our business, and I think they'll do the same for you. So principle number one, zero-based budgeting. This has been pioneered by Elon Musk. He shouts it from the rooftops. Most businesses budget by adding expenses on top of last year's spending, and that's wrong.
We switched to zero-based budgeting, which means we justified every dollar we spent from scratch. And here's what Elon has to say about zero-based budgeting. He says, every line item should be justified from scratch. No more, we spent this much last year, so let's just increase it by inflation or some arbitrary percentage. That's how you end up with bureaucratic blow.
And I couldn't agree with Elon more. And this happens even in businesses that aren't bureaucratic, right? And David Friedberg on the All In podcast talks about this all the time. Zero-based budgeting is a first principle. This forced us to cut the bloat while keeping what actually mattered. Simply cutting subscriptions didn't force us to make the hard decisions.
Chapter 4: What is the no meeting rule and why is it important?
Starting from zero, the thought experiment forced us to discuss not just what tools, but what was most important processes to drive revenue and growth profitably. What did we actually need to execute our business? Because as I had mentioned before, even though we had cut expenses, we were just cutting the things that felt expensive, not
thinking through the process as to what we actually needed to be efficient and effective. Principle number two, the no meeting rule. And this is a huge one for me because I absolutely hate meetings. Meetings are killers. We canceled every single meeting and only added back the ones that were absolutely necessary. And here's rule to be no meeting over 30 minutes ever, even all hands meetings.
You can run a meeting in 30 minutes or less. And there's a lot of research around the idea that we will fill a meeting with whatever time is scheduled. So if you could get the meeting done in 15 minutes, but it's scheduled for an hour, you will fill an hour. And that is 45 minutes of wasted time. Shorter meetings lead to more productivity and efficiency because you're forced to get to the point.
And look, I know today that in a remote workplace, we use these meetings as a chance to get to know each other and talk. And if you want to build in five to 10 minutes of connection time, I'm all for that. But just as you add meetings back in, make sure that you are intentional and purposeful in why you have this meeting and what you're trying to achieve.
Now, here's another quote from Elon on the no meetings rule. He says, excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get rid of large meetings unless you are certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short. I could not agree with Elon more.
cancel your meetings, you'll be astounded what you actually add back. Now, what we found is that instantly, our team had 15 more hours per week to focus on real work instead of pointless calls. 15 hours, it blew, absolutely blew my mind, to be honest with you. No more check-in meetings, recurring meetings without a point, and while... At first, some of our team leaders actually pushed back.
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Chapter 5: How can sales efficiency improve profits?
Within a few weeks, 100% of the feedback was positive. There was no going back. Everyone loved having that time back in their day, and productivity went through the roof. Now, before we get to principle number three, I want to let you know that this is a principle that we... found and implemented and developed ourselves internally.
And it was the real game changer for the profitability issue that we were having. And it is sales efficiency. This is the most overlooked business lever, especially for early stage entrepreneurs and founders. Most companies think that new leads is the answer. And this was our first thought as well. We actually went so far as to take on some debt in order to drive more leads into our funnel.
But more leads wasn't the answer.
Chapter 6: What key takeaways can entrepreneurs learn?
sure we were writing more business but the growth was linear it was incremental and while it was nice to see the sales numbers go up our bottom line results just they simply didn't change and that's what was killing us was profit we were frustrated we were desperate so we decided to follow the same model as with our expenses and meetings we zeroed out our sales process so instead of chasing more leads we focused on closing more of the leads we have
We tore our sales process down and rebuilt it from scratch as if we would never get more leads than we had coming in. If we were generating 25 to 30 qualified inbound leads a day, we built our sales process as if we would never generate more than 25 to 30 inbound leads a day. and that forced us to refocus on how we close those deals.
That meant a ruthless focus on customer experience, fed by real customer feedback. We actually reached out to our customers. God forbid you talk to your customers, right? We dug into human psychology to move our prospects from cold to qualified to close and streamline that process to respect our prospects' time and maximize our sales reps' total contacts per day.
We called this process the one-call close. The one-call close process took our reps from an average close ratio of 35% to over 80% in only three months. Our revenue jumped exponentially. And this is despite turning off all our additional ad campaigns that we had taken on that debt for. Not only were we making more money, but our customer feedback scores went through the roof.
And the energy inside the sales team was ridiculous because they were having the same amount of touches but just closing more business. We went from dying to thriving. And the best part was this was a repeatable process that we could train our new reps. And now we started bringing on more reps, which we didn't even think was possible. So here's the deal.
If you want the same results that will be the envy of your industry, we've packaged this up into what we call the One Call Close system and a course we call Master of the Close. You can go to masteroftheclose.com today, get access to the exact process as well as... All the PDF guides, talk tracks, scripts, everything that we use to push our reps close ratios over 80%.
And like I said, in less than 90 days, in less than 90 days, they went from 35% close ratio to 80% close ratio, right? With the addition of giving them more time back from reducing meetings, as well as looking at our expenses and building from scratch, we went from unprofitable to profitable, lighting money on fire, right?
to stacking cash in three months and because you're listening to this show i'm gonna put in the first comment of the youtube video and the description of the for the show notes if you're listening to the audio version i'm gonna put a link and a special code that you can use to get a discount because i love you guys for listening to this show it just makes me so happy that you spend your time with me and that you get value from what we're doing here so all right
Most businesses, guys, they operate based on assumptions. This is how we've always done it. The industry standard. This is what everyone else does. And that's the big mistake. That's why most businesses struggle to grow efficiently. They copy instead of thinking. And that fix is first principle thinking.
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