In this clarifying episode, Rion Westfall, Founder of 537bd, shares how to hunt internal revenue patterns and scale without chaos. If you struggle with unclear messaging and profit erosion, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What deep questions unlock control over your revenue
– How to answer “What do you do?” in seven seconds with power
– Why continual evaluation beats more processes for margin growth
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and there’s something that I see all the time. There’s founders who’ve had an enormous amount of success. They’ve successfully navigated their first major scale. They’ve got solid systems, they’ve got proven products, they have great teams, but somehow that’s not all enough. The playbook that got them to this point isn’t working anymore, and it’s just a staggering mystery when you’re right in the moment, but they’re trying to scale further, and it feels like they’re building on sand rather than bedrock. If that’s you, you’re in for a great episode today, because today’s guest is Rion Westfall. He spent years working across 15 countries and founding nine companies of his own and with others, gaining a deep understanding of how businesses operate on a global scale. Throughout his travels, he frequently conducted independent audits and operational evaluations, uncovering a recurring truth while people, processes and equipment differ, the underlying patterns of business success remain remarkably similar. Driven by this discovery, Ryan developed a specialized program centered on identifying and leveraging these internal patterns, the key to achieving scalability for small and mid sized businesses. Well, Ryan, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here.
Rion Westfall
Scott, it’s a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Scott Ritzheimer
So as I we dive in here, one of the things that I want to pull we’ve had guests from other countries, but having had the opportunity to travel a little bit myself, there’s there’s a different way of thinking about the world. When you do how is it that all of those contexts have kind of come together to to form your kind of thought and theory on how businesses operate?
Rion Westfall
Traveling around, speaking different languages. I’m fluent in both Spanish and English, so that that fluency opened different cultures to me and culturally, work ethics, everything that there’s always differences in how they approach work. Some people, a a six hour work day is all they want to put in. Some people, a 12 hour work day is just standard and normal. But regardless of who you are and what country you represent, your background, how you were raised. There’s, there’s a lot of it that just comes back to, in essence, how the company helps you organize yourself mentally to be able to produce whatever, whatever product or whatever injured you’re working for.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s, it’s interesting how many assumptions are baked into that. And one of the things that happens, and I found one of the best ways of, kind of breaking free of those assumptions, is to see the bigger patterns that are at play. And as I was getting ready for this episode, there was just so much in what you do and what you teach that jumped out on that. So when you talk about, let’s start kind of internal patterns. What are some of these key internal patterns that you’re seeing for scalability?
Rion Westfall
One of the very first ones that I see and to your point, when a an SMB, small, medium sized business, when you have your your ownership team, you’ve got your leadership team, most often, everywhere that they are finding themselves. They’re traveling to events, they’re visiting with customers, they’re out on the streets. Whether it might be in LinkedIn, it could be virtual. Everyone gets kind of one question. And when you meet with somebody new for the first time, you haven’t known them, you’ve seen this. Hey, what do you do? Right? So when somebody meets you for the first time, they’re going to ask you, Hey, what do you do? And that’s a window of opportunity that is either filled with clarity or it is often filled with jumbled answers. And one of the first patterns that I see inside businesses is that initial question, what do you do is unclear amongst the leadership team. Sometimes it’s even unclear amongst the owner themselves. To go on a five minute rant as to what you do. I like to say that that question, what do you do? Is often a plea for, what problem can you help me solve? Right, right? So if I’m interested potentially in what you do, I’m really, actually trying to seek behind the scenes. I’m trying to say, hey, what problem can you help me solve? And if that clarity is not part of, especially the leadership team, then that right there, to me, is an immediate kind of chaos. It’s a red flag to the lost potentials across multiple fronts.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s this saying we have from the church world, that if it’s a fog on the pulpit, it’s. Missed in the pews and and so. So walk me through this, because it’s not like we’re talking about people who who’ve, like, not started their business yet or and and so how is it that we create all this success and still not be able to answer that question succinctly?
Rion Westfall
Most of the time, that’s one of the first questions I ask when I start with a client, is I will ask that specific question, and clarity is power, to your point, the fog and the mist. I mean, clarity is power when you eliminate that fog, when you eliminate that mist, you’re empowered to be able to see so much more than you otherwise see. If you can’t answer that question, and virtually, I kid you not. I, I was just on a phone call about about three weeks ago. This particular founder, he’s got about a $25 million company. It’s been struggling here the last year, specifically, they ran into some issues, and I asked him this question. Scott, three hours later, within two, two and actually three different sessions, we were still working on a good answer to that question, something that he can give inside. I call it seven seconds. You know, other people call it elevator pitch, whatever it is you want to call it, but you have to be prepared to answer that question within about seven seconds, and most of the time when you can then the recipient, the person that asked that question, they’re going to, oh well, tell me more. Or or they’re going to be able to oh, well, that that’s interesting, and then they just move on. You will know very quickly in your relationship with that individual. Hey, is this something that’s going to move forward, or is this something that has has potential or it doesn’t? And so I really harp specifically on being able to be clear with answering that question. Because what it does is, is it just removes so much fog, so much missed from the company owner, right? I mean, if there’s fog, like you said, if there’s fog from the pulpit, from the company owner, from the leadership team, then there’s going to be missed in the pews. Your your people, your employees have no choice but to kind of mold their way through whatever mist it is in the work that they’re doing.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s so true. And I want to zoom out a little bit, because one of the, one of the things that we learn in the earlier stages is how to solve problems. But the problem with solving problems is that your problems scale way faster than your profits, and so as the as the organization starts to get bigger, you can get better and better at problem solving, but you still lose the game faster and faster because those problems just scale so quickly. How do we start to turn that around? Because the obvious answer, I can’t even say the obvious answer, but the popular answer, the one that all the cool kids say, is like, you need systems and processes. You need more systems and more processes. And for many organizations, that’s exactly right, but it’s not enough. What is it that we can do beyond processes to really overcome this, this challenge with the pace of problems?
Rion Westfall
The pace of problems. Well, as you mentioned, problems are ever evolving. They’re always coming at us from from different sides, different pews. It might be internal, it might be external influence, regardless of its location, the skill set and ability and their to your point, the processes that we put inside companies, right? Hey, here’s my sop one, here’s my sop two, here’s my sop three. We want the assembly line of this to be executed in such and such a way. What we’re talking about here is the evaluation style, mindset, being able to look, not only from a leadership team, but also from your your actual team, the people who do the work on the ground, most often, they will have solutions that they either don’t feel empowered internally to implement, they don’t have the chance, they don’t have the freedom, they’re not being guided by leadership, by ownership, to actually help evolve the company. And you know, as well as I do, we’ve got top line numbers and we’ve got bottom line numbers when we often think scaling. My experience is owners think, hey, more money in means more money at the bottom right. I grow my top line. I’m going to grow my bottom line. But to your point, everything in between those pieces, if we’ve. Got bad habits. If we’ve got margin being left on the table because we’re doing this a little bit wrong, or we could be doing this a little bit better, we’re forgetting to do certain things. If the internal aspect is not being continually addressed throughout that scaling growth, then you know, the bottom line is just going to be from a percentage standpoint, sometimes less. And you’re you’re really just creating more headaches for yourself. Last week, I was in a conversation with one of my clients. He’s doing about 6, $7 million and his comment to me, as I was digging in a little bit further, he says, I was actually making more money when I was just a $2 million business. I was making more money when I was a $2 million business, and it’s nowhere near the amount of stress. And he honestly said, he says, I think I might go back to that. Yeah. And he’s like, I don’t see the point in growing to become a 10 million or a $15 million company or a $20 million company, if the transition of what he’s experienced from two to six or seven, if that’s what I want, he says, I don’t want any of that. I That’s not why I started a business so. So to your point, absolutely, we have to be in a position to continually evaluate, and there is a process, there’s a pattern, a recipe to kind of follow to be able to help pull those things out in time.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so Ryan, what’s the difference between that and something that so many of us have experienced? I know I did so when we started bumping into some of these challenges that you’re talking about not bumping into, just getting crushed by some of these challenges. Yeah, we went out and it’s like, okay, we can’t figure this out. Let’s hire somebody who can. And so we hired three consultants in three different areas of expertise, and systematically, all of them failed us. In fact, I made some of the worst decisions following their well meaning but Ill timed advice than I did any other place. We lost so much money following that advice. Why does that break down so often? What? What’s, what’s the difference between that and what you’re talking about here, from a pattern perspective?
Rion Westfall
Because consultants are notorious for, most oftentimes, giving you advice, right? That’s probably why you hired him. You couldn’t see something, and you said, hey, if I hire a consultant, I want him to help me see something that I’m not seeing, right? I mean, would that be correct? Is that is that kind of why you typically hire? So the question, then your question about, why does that break down? I find mostly I can’t speak for other consultants, but I find mostly when I do work with my clients and they tell me comments like, Hey, I’ve learned more from you in two sessions than I did in, you know, a year and $20,000 working with X consultant. One guy even told me after about our fourth session, he says, I’ve learned more here than I have in three years at Vistage. And as you go through I think, I think part of it i i love sports, and so I grew up playing sports. I was with the Dodgers at one point on their on their farm League, and I had one, one coach. I had no idea who he was, and he just comes up to me and he looks at me and he says, radial deviation. And I was like, What? What does that mean? And he’s like, here, let me, let me help you and explain. And in baseball, when you’re holding the bat and you take your your front wrist and you radially deviate your wrist, it creates a different angle in the bat, and as you bring it through on the swing, it creates much a higher bat speed, which then creates, you know, basically a bigger pop when you’re actually hitting the ball. I had no clue. I mean, Scott, I had played on these select teams. I’d been up in, you know, college. We’d been doing all these things. I had no clue what it was, but this one individual just pointed it out to me and shared with me what it was, taught me what it was, and then I went to implement so when, when you’re saying these consultants really, my best answer would be that you’re right. I’ve seen that play out. My role, I feel, as a consultant, as a coach, is to help you see what you haven’t seen yet. Is, is to ask the questions, not dictate what you’re doing, but just simply help, help you see. And so I built my entire pattern finding. I mean, that’s what that’s what I say. I do. I tactically hunt revenue patterns. I’m just on. Hunt. We’re continually hunting. So if we take that analogy kind of like a guide, right? Guides guide you to whatever it is that you’re wanting to hunt, but you still have to pull the trigger. So I think to your point, many times those consultants are are trying to pull the trigger, and that’s where that breakdown happens. They’re pulling the trigger when it’s not being founded by the by the by the owner themselves.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And to be fair, and not paint this all as a consultant problem, we chose folks that would do that right. We were we, and I see this all the time in the founders that I work with. But there’s this pool of, hey, if they’ve done what I want to do, if they’re a good batter, they can make me a better batter, right? But what you really need, you don’t need another batter to tell you how to bat. You need another batting coach who can identify the problems in your swing, the opportunities that are available to you, and they do that with just a very different lens, like what you’re talking about, of coming in and hunting for the patterns. I love that language. That’s excellent. So Ryan, there’s this question that I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you have to say, especially with the backdrop of the conversation so far. But what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Rion Westfall
All patterns follow a process, right? There’s, there’s a recipe. This is either intentionally built or it’s an unintentional chaos to the company and in, in order to unlock those pieces. Like you said, What is the biggest secret? I mean, it’s really not a secret. I think it’s the biggest challenge. It’s it’s hard to actually get deep, to do that deep dive, I think the consultant’s biggest influence on an owner lies in the questions that are being asked, right? And the more powerful the question, the more powerful the potential answer and the finding of whatever it is that they’re in search of. In this case, we’re looking for two things. Actually, most of the time, we’re looking for a higher profit margin, and we’re looking for ownership. That’s why I call it own. Your Own your revenue. If we’re looking for control of the revenue within our company, how are we growing? How are we succeeding? To your point, I absolutely love your your your breakdown of the entrepreneurs. You know your seven stages as you’re you know, we’re really talking about what, four and five right now. You know the kind of that stage where we’ve got our business, we’ve got our 10 million, our 20 million, our 30 million, whatever it is. And we’re trying to say, hey, how do I step away from this? How do I become, if I got the terminology right? I think it’s visionary. Founder, you’re stage seven, right? How do I reach that? Those are deep dive questions. So my, my, my counsel to anyone listening to this is, yes, consultants will have history. They’ll have performances when they’ve done well, but really be looking for who’s going to challenge me, who’s going to deep dive into questions and ask me things that I just I just haven’t really thought of, or I haven’t had the wherewithal to actually ask those specific questions, and when you can find someone that’s going to actually sit down and challenge you, that’s when you found that’s when you found gold. That’s when you found something that’s going to help you become that visionary leader. And so, so that would, that would be my, I guess, secret.
Scott Ritzheimer
Excellent, Rion, there’s some folks listening, and it’s just the right word at just the right time. They’re looking for the kind of help that you offer. Where can folks find more out about the work that you do and reach out and connect with you directly?
Rion Westfall
The best place to connect is LinkedIn. I do a lot of work there on LinkedIn. Obviously there’s a web page, 537bd.com, or business development, so I’m on there as well. And links there, you can schedule times, and I’m sure with this, you’ll also have my contact information on here too.
Scott Ritzheimer
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Ryan, thanks for being on the show. Really a privilege and honor. Having you here with us today, for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time take care.
Contact Rion Westfall
Rion Westfall has spent years working across 15 countries and founding nine companies, gaining a deep understanding of how businesses operate on a global scale. Throughout his travels, he frequently conducted independent audits and operational evaluations, uncovering a recurring truth — while people, processes, and equipment may differ, the underlying patterns of business success remain remarkably similar. Driven by this discovery, Rion developed a specialized program centered on identifying and leveraging these internal patterns — the key to achieving scalability for small and mid-sized businesses.
Want to learn more about Rion Westfall’s work at 537bd? Check out his website at https://www.537bd.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rion-westfall-own-your-revenue-business/