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24. 100% Scrappy: How Drew Dowd Diagnoses Broken Businesses and Grows Them · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  What's happening everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful, the show where I sit down with your favorite consultants.
• 0:10
  We take the comedic route through their life and find out if they're successful because they're sophisticated or scrappy.
• 0:18
  I'm your host Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm, always helping small businesses become more data-driven.
• 0:26
  Fun fact: the average person makes about 35,000 decisions in a single day - but what's for dinner takes half an hour.
• 0:34
  Today I'm joined by my friend Drew Dowd, an operations and revenue leader with an MBA that doesn't quite tell the full story.
• 0:42
  He walks into broken systems at companies, diagnoses them, fixes them, and watches the business grow because of it.
• 0:50
  Drew, we know you're successful. The question is: do you fall more on the sophisticated or the scrappy side?
• 0:56
  Without a doubt, I'm 100% on the scrappy side.
• 1:01
  Nice! We're gonna see if the data agrees with you. Where'd you grow up? Any scrappy entrepreneurs in the family?
• 1:09
  Not really. My great-grandfather was a sniper in World War II, my grandpa was a mechanic and drag racer.
• 1:20
  My dad owned an automotive shop for a while. But mostly my life was just figuring things out.
• 1:30
  I grew up in rural southeast Missouri. It was all about finding ways to have fun with what you had.
• 1:40
  My hometown was about 15,000 people. The next biggest city, maybe half that size, was two hours away. All farmland.
• 1:51
  A lot of my time was spent in farmland - trail riding, horses, stuff like that growing up.
• 2:00
  My high school - if you're familiar with Missouri - I graduated with about 330 kids. Surrounding schools had classes of 30.
• 2:10
  In high school? Yeah, there was candy. World's Finest chocolate. But I ended up just eating it all myself anyway.
• 2:20
  We also sold discount cards. That was my real intro to cold selling - walking door to door with a bike and a buddy.
• 2:31
  Local stores would offer discounts on these cards. It got them more foot traffic and customers more savings.
• 2:41
  A lot of doors got shut in my face. But that was kind of my real intro into actual selling.
• 2:51
  My first real job - froyo. I worked at a frozen yogurt store for about a year, year and a half, learned how the machines worked.
• 3:01
  After that I worked at a food truck that started as a lemonade stand at a farmer's market.
• 3:11
  The owner had 20 different lemonade flavors and was maniacal about the temperature he heated everything at. A genuine science.
• 3:20
  Then he introduced burgers. One was the Memphis King - peanut butter on a Hawaiian bun. Eventually eight different burgers.
• 3:30
  People just kept coming nonstop. The menu grew to 15 burger types. He couldn't handle the foot traffic, so he went brick and mortar.
• 3:41
  In that small town, you really only had Mexican, Chinese, and a buffet. Something different from that could actually work - and it did.
• 3:51
  He tracked lemonade sales week over week. That was the product people kept coming back for. He'd forecast from that data.
• 4:02
  He'd start prepping at 5 or 6 AM. I was responsible for the lemons - we're talking 500 to 1,000 lemons in a morning.
• 4:12
  You become the sous chef. You prep the buns, the condiments, and he's only doing the grill. Teamwork clicked into place.
• 4:22
  I didn't consciously understand systems thinking at the time, but I picked it up: if the right things are in place, it's really not that hard to have a successful business.
• 4:33
  He always kept saying: no matter what the customer requests, you just do it. And you take the time to actually talk with them.
• 4:44
  Everybody became a repeat customer. If they came one day, they were going to come back the next. No one-and-done visitors.
• 4:55
  I was there from ages 17 to 20. That's when a lot of this started taking shape for me.
• 5:05
  It didn't influence my college major directly, but it influenced how I saw how a business could function.
• 5:15
  In elementary school, when I'd get in trouble and had to write a sentence 100 times, I'd never write each sentence fully.
• 5:25
  I'd write one letter 100 times, then move to the next word. I got done way faster than everyone else.
• 5:35
  That connected to business: if you have consistent inputs like Henry Ford's assembly line, it applies everywhere.
• 5:45
  In my capstone class we ran a business simulation and those things finally started surfacing consciously.
• 5:55
  I have a brain that just walks in somewhere and thinks: okay, there's more money to be made here. It's instinctual.
• 6:05
  I was an athlete growing up. If there's a scoreboard, I'm going to find a way to manipulate outcomes to my advantage.
• 6:15
  Most of the time your initial instinct of what needs to change is not actually correct. It's usually just a symptom.
• 6:25
  I was at a company running an outbound dialing system. Appointment booking rates were dropping. Everyone said: dial harder.
• 6:35
  But it had been a slow degradation and the input numbers hadn't changed. So brute force didn't make sense.
• 6:45
  If you've read The Goal by Eli Goldratt - it's the theory of constraints. Every business has one bottleneck.
• 6:55
  Turns out we were only connecting with 2.5% of our leads. Not because of effort - every call was showing up as spam.
• 7:05
  I researched TCPA compliance, how phone systems flag spam, made some tweaks, and raised our connection rate to 10%.
• 7:15
  Nothing else changed. We tripled booked appointments, cut ad spend by 30%, and margins improved from there.
• 7:25
  A phrase I love: you can't prescribe dosages until you understand mechanisms.
• 7:35
  In 1962, researchers wanted to give an elephant LSD. They assumed a linear dose based on body size versus humans.
• 7:45
  The elephant passed out within five minutes and was dead within two hours.
• 7:55
  They didn't understand the mechanisms of how LSD worked in the brain or how it was metabolized.
• 8:05
  With the phone system: unless you understand what causes a number to flag as spam, you can't prescribe the solution.
• 8:15
  You have to be diagnostic. Like a doctor - understand the full body, not just height and weight.
• 8:25
  For the small business owner who says "we don't have a system" - everything is a system. It might just not work well.
• 8:35
  The most helpful thing is centralization. Just have one place where all your projects live.
• 8:45
  Everyone sees the same thing. Take each project, identify the high-level process, and assign an owner.
• 8:55
  What I uniquely think about are cognitive bottlenecks. When you don't have visibility, your mind has open loops.
• 9:05
  As a business owner, thinking is your single highest-leverage asset. I try to frame everything around: how do we free more of that up?
• 9:15
  I don't think every business needs a project management system. You just need some way to have clarity and know what's happening.
• 9:25
  Not anti-documentation at all. But you don't need SOPs for everything. You need them for your core revenue-driving processes.
• 9:35
  If you have 100% trust, most SOPs aren't needed. People would just know their job and do it.
• 9:45
  The real question: do people know what their job is and what "done" actually looks like? That's on the business owner.
• 9:55
  I helped a company go from $500K to $1M per month in revenue. Our entire project management was a Google Doc.
• 10:05
  We had two meetings per week: a leadership meeting for projects and a KPI meeting for department health.
• 10:15
  Everything else was async in Slack. No recurring one-on-ones. That's all we ran on, and we didn't need anything more.
• 10:25
  A lot of people use "we need to document everything" as a means of escaping something - procrastination, avoidance.
• 10:35
  Before you even document, you need to know what actually exists. Document how things really work now, in their less-than-ideal form.
• 10:45
  What you'll find is those processes aren't actually bad. People just drift, and nobody has true ownership.
• 10:55
  I was at the company that scaled and started as a sales rep. I was always thinking three levels above me.
• 11:05
  I built overly sophisticated dashboards at first and they just didn't get used because they were too complicated.
• 11:15
  It took three or four projects of that happening before I got the hint: usability matters more than sophistication.
• 11:25
  There was a period where I made a bad call - adjusted the system, and it led to about a 15-20% drop in revenue.
• 11:35
  I was able to fix it and run it back. But yeah, you've got to mess up a lot.
• 11:45
  99% of things are reversible. Fail fast. Get the feedback and fix it.
• 11:55
  I gear toward launching at 50% because every system still has humans interacting with it. It has to be flexible.
• 12:05
  If you over-engineer to 90%, half the stuff you built won't even be useful once real users touch it.
• 12:15
  People are smarter and more intuitive than you think. Get the bones right, and they'll tell you what to fix.
• 12:25
  Speed over structure. From speed you can get structure faster. I have impatient patience: patient for the outcome, impatient with the path.
• 12:35
  Whenever I over-thought things or was super intentional, things rarely worked out how I expected.
• 12:45
  Might as well go fast, see what breaks, get the feedback. That's also just what keeps me personally engaged.
• 12:55
  Lightning round. Booking a meeting: do you say "I'm free Thursday afternoon" or send a calendar link?
• 13:05
  Sending a calendar link.
• 13:10
  How do you answer the phone for someone you know? Usually just "yo." If I don't recognize the number: "this is Drew."
• 13:20
  Voicemail or text? Text. Work from the couch? Maybe 30 minutes a month.
• 13:30
  If I'm on the couch, that's relax mode. I have to be at a desk or a cafe. Only two options.
• 13:40
  Office setup: the big monitor plus the laptop propped open. Dream setup is three monitors, but I haven't needed it yet.
• 13:50
  I've got a docking station. No weird lighting maneuvers unless it's cloudy - then I have to tie the cheap stand to the desk.
• 14:00
  I bought the expensive light, but the cheap stand. It just falls over. I have to tie it off with a coin.
• 14:10
  Workspace: not exactly clean. Allergy medication, phone holder, a tablet I don't even use. Color-coordinated books in the background though.
• 14:20
  I'm probably borderline psychotic. I'll get on a stint where I need the books color-coordinated but everything else is chaos.
• 14:30
  My productivity app is a notebook and a pen. The most important things I will remember. I won't forget them.
• 14:40
  I used to do Notion boards. Found that I was just procrastinating. Give me pen and paper, I'll get more done.
• 14:50
  Sold something I'd never done before? Yes. Telecom and cybersecurity, a $3-4K per month phone system deal.
• 15:00
  I just said we'd do it, went back, the engineers weren't thrilled - but they said it was figureoutable. Ended up working out.
• 15:10
  At the media agency I'm at now, a client asked us to completely rebrand their website and logo. Owner said: yeah, we do that all the time.
• 15:20
  We had to outsource half of it. If you're confident it's figureoutable, say yes and figure it out.
• 15:30
  Most scrappy gift moment: when my wife got back from her bachelorette party, I completely forgot I was supposed to get her a gift.
• 15:40
  Went to Trader Joe's, got five-dollar flowers and a card. But I have a fountain pen, so I wrote calligraphy on the note.
• 15:50
  Took two hours to write six to ten lines of calligraphy. But it worked - it's in a frame on the wall now.
• 16:00
  Last-minute scrappiness turned into a forever memory. That's the scrappy mindset at its best.
• 16:10
  How do you define success with clients? From the high level: did the business grow ethically?
• 16:20
  Profit volume is always number one. Revenue staying in range without margin - what are we doing?
• 16:30
  In a restructure phase, it's individual KPIs. In a growth phase, it's profit volume. Depends where you are.
• 16:40
  I'm a data nerd - it's everything to me. But data tells me where to look. It doesn't necessarily tell me what to do.
• 16:50
  Close rate is a lagging indicator of prior actions. That's not actually a lever you can pull.
• 17:00
  The only way to find the real lever is through the data. Data tells you where to look - not what action to take.
• 17:10
  Drew, thank you so much for coming on. 100% scrappy. There's sophistication in there, but we're calling it scrappy all the way.
• 17:20
  Anything you want folks to know? Ways to connect with you?
• 17:30
  Connect with me on LinkedIn - just Drew Dowd. I'm very responsive on there and I love connecting with people.
• 17:40
  That's how we connected - it works folks. 100% scrappy. Drew Dowd, everybody. Thanks so much for listening.