Okay, let’s talk about this Ryan Sloan stuff. I kept hearing the name pop up, mostly in circles talking about business growth, you know, getting things more predictable. For a while, I just ignored it, like most things you hear online.
But my own little project, sort of a side hustle consultancy thing, was stuck. Really stuck. I was getting leads, sure, but they were all over the place. Some wanted cheap stuff, some wanted things I didn’t really do well. It was exhausting, felt like I was spinning my wheels constantly.
Digging into Sloan’s Ideas
So, one weekend, I finally decided to see what the fuss was about. Didn’t buy a big course or anything, just pieced things together from stuff I could find, interviews, articles he’d written. A core idea that jumped out at me was this focus on systems and, more specifically, really understanding the economics of acquiring a customer. Not just getting leads, but getting the right leads profitably.
He talked a lot about knowing your numbers inside and out. Not just revenue, but:
- How much does it actually cost to get someone interested?
- How many interested people actually become clients?
- How much is each client worth over time?
It sounded basic, but honestly, I hadn’t been tracking this stuff properly. I was just chasing revenue.
Putting it into Practice – My Messy Attempt
So, I decided to try and implement just that part: figure out my real customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV).
First step, I had to actually track things. Before, I was just using a simple spreadsheet for income and expenses. Pretty useless for this.
I started logging everything. Where did every single lead come from? How much time did I spend talking to them? Did they buy? If yes, how much did they spend initially, and did they come back for more later?
This was tedious. Took me a good month just to get a baseline. I pulled old emails, invoices, calendar entries. It was a mess. Found out I spent way too much time on leads from certain places that almost never converted.
Next, I tried to calculate the LTV. This was harder because my thing was relatively new. I had to make educated guesses based on the few repeat clients I had. It wasn’t perfect science, more like a rough estimate.
Then, the CAC. I added up costs for little ads I’d run, tools I used for outreach, and even estimated the cost of my time spent on calls with leads that went nowhere. This was sobering. My cost to get a client was way higher than I thought for some channels.
What Happened?
Okay, so after a couple of months of this tracking and rough calculation, things started to become clearer. It wasn’t some magic bullet Sloan provided, but the act of focusing on these numbers, like he suggests, forced me to see the waste.
The big change: I stopped wasting time on lead sources that looked busy but didn’t actually bring in profitable clients. I saw one channel brought in maybe 50% of my leads, but only 5% of my actual income, and took up tons of my time in calls. I cut that channel way back.
I also realized the clients who paid a bit more upfront tended to stick around longer (higher LTV). So, I started focusing my messaging more towards attracting those types, even if it meant fewer leads overall initially.
It’s still a work in progress. My numbers aren’t perfect, and my system for tracking is still a bit clunky. But knowing even roughly what it costs to get the right client versus just any client has made a huge difference. I feel less frantic, more in control. It’s just about knowing your own situation, really. Sloan’s ideas just gave me a nudge to actually look at the boring numbers.
