Right About Now with Ryan Alford - The Brutal Reason Most Entrepreneurs Never Scale: Busywork, Sales, and Weak Offers | Tanner Chidester

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Ryan Alford talks with Tanner Chidester about the difference between looking productive and actually building a business that makes money. Tanner explains why so many founders are trapped in the wrong tasks, why leads and sales volume still matter more than most people want to admit, and how weak follow-up systems quietly kill otherwise good businesses. The conversation also covers offer design, guarantees, branding, Tanner’s book Infinite Income, and the habits that separate solopreneurs from leaders who can actually scale teams. Ryan brings the operator and agency perspective, while Tanner brings the blunt, tactical lens of someone who has built, sold, hired, fired, coached, and learned the hard way. By the end, the episode becomes a bigger conversation about what it really takes to move from information to action. That includes doing the hard thing you have been avoiding, accepting that no one is coming to save you, and building something strong enough that the market does not need to be convinced as hard in the first place. Topics Covered Why entrepreneurs often choose busywork over sales work How better offers reduce friction in marketing and sales Why follow-up systems matter more than changing media buyers What Tanner sees inside businesses that are stuck Why door-to-door sales builds real skill fast What Tanner would change about Infinite Income Why Tanner is moving toward a bigger next chapter Ryan Alford and Tanner Chidester on execution, authority, and scale Links Right About Now https://www.ryanisright.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Tanner Chidester https://tannerchidester.com/ https://www.instagram.com/tanner.chidester/ https://tannerchidester.com/podcast2/ Elite CEOs https://go.eliteceos.com/main-elite-ceos-careers https://go.eliteceos.com/tanner-in-person

You guys are doing all these things to avoid the work that you know you need to do it. Sometimes they know they need to do it, but they try to do other things to feel they're being productive, even though they know those are the wrong things to do. You can't avoid it. When I got back and I was looking inside my business, I just knew I have to cut all these reps. And it was the whole sales team for a division. I have to go out and find four new guys, not one, four. And I didn't want to do it, but I just knew that's what I had to do. And I think a lot of people avoid that. writing it. Seven hundred episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is right about now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys. What's up? I'm Ryan Alford, your host. We save it's radical. We cover it. We cover it more than once. That's why we got Tanner. Jidester back. What's up, Tanner? What's up, Brian? Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, man. Founder of Elite CEOs, author of infinite income. We need infinite wisdom from Tanner. Let's remind everybody a little bit, Tanner, about elite CEOs and how you help aspiring entrepreneurs. I start off in the fitness industry.

When I was younger, I wanted to play in the NFL. I took that LAD one level. I got hurt a bunch. I don't think I was good enough. I did play some first round draft picks, so that was a blessing. I started a fitness business, and it did super, super well, and it did so well that I had trainers start asking me for help, especially from the ClickFunnels community. I had my little two comic Club Award and they're like, oh, this guy, he got it, not being a business coach. Ironically, all these people want me to business coach them. And I said, hey, man, I don't want to do that. I hate business coaches.

After a while, they keep asking, you see the dollar signs. I was a young guy. I was 25, 26. I started doing it. And then that did so well that I started helping people outside of fitness. In short, when people ask what we do or what Alicios does is I just showed everyone what I did to become a multimillionaire from the messaging, the sales, the marketing, the ads, hiring, training, managing, all that stuff, back in systems.

And there's just a lot of people out there who don't know what to do. What we're trying to do is just shortcut that for them. That's really it. It seems like there's this oversaturation of coaches. Obviously, more and more people are tuning in and hiring coaches and doing that. I don't think that's going away. But what's going to separate or be the differentiator for the ones that stick around and the ones that end up back in fast food?

You got to be good. When I first got in, it was newer or it seemed newer to me. And so when COVID hit, it just accelerated everything because everybody was looking for things online and stuff like that. Facebook was loving life. They were serving all kinds of those ads. Now what's happened is that trust has gone down because trust is so low. It's just taking an immense amount of marketing to get people through. The first reason it's getting harder is when you think about it, a hundred million dollar offers came out and I really hit on a lot of these things well. Let's say you're a business consultant and there's 10 other business consultants. You're having to

get people to understand, hey, I do similar things, but I'm better. And that's a harder pitch than I do something completely different. I build flying cars and no one's doing it. So that's the number one thing to understand why it's gotten harder because now the trust is lower and they see all these different options. And then a lot of people, what do they do? They pick the cheapest option versus the best option because pay values what you get. A lot of people make mistakes there. That means the marketing has to be really, really good. And a lot of people just aren't good at marketing. That's why having a hundred million dollar offer makes it easier because the marketing doesn't have to be as good. The team doesn't have to be as good. The sales reps can mess up. You'll still make a lot of

money. That's the first part. The second part is then thinking about what can you do differently? I'll give you one of my clients who has an amazing offer. He legally helps people get green cards and he can't guarantee it, but it's essentially guaranteed on his app. It's crazy. His app will say the price is 15K. Can you pay it? They get on the call and there's no sales call. It's just basically they're just customer service rep who just processes the payment. To me, I'm going, wow, that is a great offer. That is a really good offer. The final part is part of why I'm looking to do other things is not because I hate what I do and I love it. And to be honest, it's helped a lot of people. And being back recently, I've been so out of the business for so long that it was kind of good to get back in the trenches to get reminded.

It really helps some people. They'll send messages and say, I had a guy the other day, hey, man, I was doing zero dollars for three months and I hadn't told anyone. And then you helped me. We had a conversation. And now I've done 70K and 30 days. I don't care. I don't need more money. I was like, wow, that really is cool. Because you kind of get really far away from that sometimes. But then the other part is I'm trying to do things that hit more of the criteria that billionaires seem to follow. And with all the conversations I've had, the reason a lot of them don't stay in the info

space is not there's a lot of good. There's a lot of bad. It's 80% is bad. 20% is good. But it's because it's not a no-brainer. When the offer's not a no-brainer, it's very hard to scale because you have to spend so much money on marketing and sales teams. And that cuts margin.

A lot of these companies I've seen to scale to tremendous levels, they basically don't even have to market. If you get 60% of your expenses back, it's a lot easier to scale.